[seul-edu] A new topic

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

Hilaire Fernandes and I had a discussion the other day about the role of
SEUL/edu in the development of open source educational software and the
advocacy of Linux ports of existing educational software.  I'll probably
accidentally misrepresent Hilaire's views slightly here, so I'm counting on
him to correct me.  OK, Hilaire?

Hilaire believes that we should be devoting the bulk of our effort to the
development of open source educational software for Linux.  He believes
that any time spent in trying to convince commercial educational software
vendors to support Linux is not only wasted (as they'll do Linux ports
anyway if it becomes profitable for them), but actively detracts from the
efforts we're making toward software development.

I respectfully disagree.  I believe we have enough people here to work on
both these (and other) aspects of the goal of making Linux a great
operating system for schools without spreading ourselves too thin.  I
contend that the people who don't feel themselves able to contribute to the
coding or writing of documentation can be involved in such commercial port
advocacy without slowing down any other efforts.

I'd like to get your opinions on the place for commercial port advocacy at
SEUL/edu.  This is a question on which intelligent, polite people can
disagree, so I don't want this to get too heated or personal.  From our
discussions over the past year, I don't think it will be at all difficult
for us all to be civil about this.

We also talked about coming up with a mission statement of some sort to
make our purpose clearer in everyone's minds.  We (SEUL/edu) started
discussing something like this back in July in this message
<http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/edu/Jul-1999/msg00318.html>, but never
finished it up.  We should revisit this too and see if we can't come up
with something to post on the website.

-- 
Doug Loss            There's no trick to being a humorist
dloss@suscom.net     when you have the whole government
(570) 326-3987       working for you.
                        Will Rogers