[Holger Levsen] > What do you think of the general idea? Personally, I fail to see how our target group, the schools that currently use windows and are in need of a free software based alternative, will benefit at all.
Working on two distributions will cost more effort and man-hours, and we are short on both, and the schools I know of have not expressed once that they want a distribution that fail to work with their hardware and lack support for the tools they need to do their work. The difference between your ideas for two separate distributions would be that one would work with as much hardware as we can reasonable get to work, and the other would not. And for lenny, the only other difference would be if etoys is installed by default or not. To me it is simple. The effort we spend should make sure to improve the experience for schools and school adminstrators. That means one project, one distribution and two names. The two-name issue is simply a result of merging two projects a few years ago, and I believe there is no need to try to assign the two names two different meanings. They are simply the original names of two projects that merged. We keep both because, the skolelinux name have strong branding in some groups (like Norway), while the Debian Edu have stronger branding in other areas (like Debian). I hope some time in the future we can provide a fully working solution for schools using only free software, but until hardware vendors stop shipping non-free firmware, we have a fully free flash implementation on par with the Adobe version (or Adobe release its version as free software) and we do not see the point of providing any non-free applications, I believe we are doing schools most good by providing _one_ good distributions for them to use and not waste testing and development resources. We need to ask ourself when we work if our effort make it easier for schools to use free software and Skolelinux/Debian Edu, and if the answer is no, we should probably reconsider what we are doing. :) Happy hacking, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
