Re: Your Mission (should you choose to accept it)

[bickiia@earlham.edu]

>> I think there are two ways in which Linux is fundamentally different

>> from these other systems.  
>
>Only two ways ?

*Fundamentally* different -- it has other differences t0o, but they are
just improvements, which aren't enough in themselves to make it an
exceptional platform.  Many a program, programming language, and
operating system has fallen by the wayside when it offered only
technical improvements.

>> First, Linux is multiuser.  [...]
>> 
>> Second, Linux is built (mostly) on Free Software [...]
>> 
>
>Third, Linux is a Unix OS, and provides full network connectivity.
>Very few softwares use this ability in the educational context.

True, but that potential exists on most operating systems.  I don't know
a lot about RiscOS, but my impression is that it's a pretty nice
operating system that manages to do these things.  As does BeOS.  And
even if it takes MS a while to get there, they've mostly accomplished
these things in Windows as well.

>Fourth, Linux is really multitasking and multithreaded. As to now,
>little attention has been paied to this. For instance, there is no 
>need to build a complete multimedia interface into each educational 
>software, since each software can communicate with separate processes 

>which are allready optimized to deal with multimedia documents.

The Unix philosophy of many small tools working together is an important
one, and hopefully can be used to make educational software considerably
easier to produce under Linux.  Of course, any ported application won't
adhere to this philosophy -- it's only a philosophy, after all, not a
requirement.  But I hope any new software that comes out for Linux will
manage to do this.  And now that there are a couple Unix desktops, it's
actually possible to do this for GUI programs, where once only
command-line programs knew this interdependance.

So I think that has the potential to be an important difference -- but
that's only a potential, not inevitable, advantage to Linux.