Re: [seul-edu] SEUL/edu Mission

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

Darryl Palmer wrote:
> What exactly is the Mission of SEUL/edu and should the ISO project be
> inline with it?
The ISO project should conform to the overall mission statement of the 
SEUL/edu project, yes.  Since the creation of Schoolforge, SEUL/edu's 
mission has changed slightly, which is (I think) why there's a perceived 
 discrepancy here.  I'll try to explain later.

> The web page states the following:
>
> "SEUL/edu is dedicated to furthering the use of Linux and other open
> resources in education. This covers all aspects of educational uses of
> Linux, by teachers, parents, and students.
That hasn't changed.

> We are collecting resources that should enable the development and
> deployment (with the help of interested volunteers) of various open
> source software that can make Linux more desirable to educators and
> parents interested in using Linux for their children's education."
I think that's accurate too.

> Yet we are including software on the ISO which is not open source.  Is
> this a contradiction with the mission?  It doesn't matter to me if we
> include non-OSS packages or not but the problem with Kara got me
> thinking.
When we started SEUL/edu, we were pretty much the only place to go if 
you were interested in Linux and education and how they related to one 
another.  For that reason, we (me, mostly) decided to be very 
"ecumenical" about our role, accepting input from anyone who shared our 
interest, commercial, non-commercial, open-source, proprietary, 
whatever.  Some folks were uncomfortable with that mixture and created 
purely open source forums for the discussion of Linux in education (and 
for all I know, purely commercial ones, althought I haven't heard of 
such).  Those forums are doing valuable work, and we support them.

Since we created Schoolforge, that "ecumenical" discussion role was 
transferred to the schoolforge-discuss mailing list.  Since the role of 
the seul-edu mailing list is now primarily to support the SEUL/edu 
projects, things here have changed slightly.

In the context of our App Index project, discussion of non-open-source 
applications is justified, in that the App Index is intended to record 
_all_ educationally useful applications that run on Linux.  Users can 
make the philosophical choice of whether to use commercial apps or not 
for themselves, but they should know the options that are available to them.

The casestudies project doesn't really enter into the discussion, 
because it just chronicles what people are actually doing at their 
schools and doesn't engender much chat on the list.

The ISO project is where the real question lies.  From the first, my 
intent was to provide a compilation of educationally useful applications 
that users could easily install on Linux systems.  Since we're giving it 
away, the standard restrictions on distribution that commercial apps 
carry make them non-candidates for inclusion.   Open Source and Public 
Domain apps are clearly includeable.  The fuzzy area is apps that are 
licensed as "free for non-commercial use".  That is non-open-source, and 
we can't guarantee that the people downloading our ISO will be only 
non-commercial entities.  In at least one case, we contacted the 
maintainer of an app licensed in this fashion and explained what we 
planned.  He gave us explicit permission to include his app on the ISO, 
which I think is adequate.

I try to steer clear of licensing issues as much as possible.  My main 
concerns are that the apps we include be useful in scholastic settings 
and that the maintainers of those apps are comfortable with having them 
included on our ISO.

--
If this helped you please take the time to rate the value
of this post; just click on the Affero link below.

http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=drloss

Doug Loss                 Courage is resistance to
Data Network Coordinator  fear, mastery of fear --
Bloomsburg University     not absence of fear.
dloss@bloomu.edu           Mark Twain