Re: Education strategy

On Sun, 12 May 2002 15:23:26 +0200
Christian Selig <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi there.
> 
> What we've got here are thoughts on migration.
> 
> We cannot force or even just request people to convert from proprietary 
> to free software in one day. I'm very positive that most people will use 
> more and more free software once they understand the idea and see its 
> practical values (such as free distribution to pupils and community 
> development) and step by step philosophical values.

From my experience, this step by step introduction to the free softare value 
worked very well with ported (or multiplateform) free software from GNU to Win32.
This means users first start using free software under a win32 system then they may 
investigate more using an entirely free system.
I have found Gimp and OO to be very good advocate of the free software values.
For sure, in the Landes state (France), Gimp will be shipped with about ~4000 notebooks
for student and teachers. Other free software may be shipped also with the notebooks.


> I think that the education sector is too important that we can have 
> splitted efforts. For example, I would invite KDE-Edu people to join us, 
> as they have some very good pieces of free edu software.

I am not sure about which split in the free education software community your are talking about
but I do not see any reason to not work with KDE-Edu people. As far as I know they are
developping free software.


> 
> That would be a good idea. Maybe we can collect some right on this list.
> 
> My one is:
> 
> Mediator is a proprietary presentation program ("multimedia", but please 
> don't use that term - it's overused by the group of politicians who 
> don't understand IT) that allows for much more than stupid slide 
> mechanisms. I remember that KPresenter is heading a bit towards such a 
> goal, but Mediator is hell easy to use, easier than any presentation or 
> vector drawing program that I've ever seen. A free equivalent is badly 
> missing.

I think I receive a demo disk of this software at my office, I will try it out.
But what about the presentation module of OO. You said that KPresenter was leading
into that direction, how far it is from that, may be starting a project from the ground
for that is not necessary?


Hilaire