* Anne-Marie Mahfouf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-09-30 16:58:51]: > Hi, > > I am Anne-Marie, the KDE-Edu module coordinator (and founder). I am glad > Edubuntu uses our programs and I would like to work more closely with you all > in order to get feedback from teachers, schools and parents to > 1) improve our current applications > 2) develop new programs according to your wishes. > > A polemic is starting regarding Kalzium as it seems the Edubuntu team is > developing a Kalzium-like for Gnome (Gallium). I find this a bit strange and > I would like to ask you your intentions for the future. Are you going to > duplicate our work (you perfectly have the right to do so) or are we going to > work together in order to offer more educational programs to teachers? > The kdelibs and qt on which the KDE-Edu programs depend are not big > dependencies. GCompris for example is also quite big (if I quote his author, > he said to me GCompris is bigger than Gnome itself). It's already difficult > to have developers doing educational work as most are young and have no > children and prefer working on multimedia for example. Duplicating the > current work would be a waste of time. > > I hope you can clarify all that so we (KDE-Edu and Edubuntu) can begin a > partnership if you are interested.
Anne-Marie, First of all, thanks for all your effort in KDE-Edu, it is a first class educational software suite. I have always been very impressed with it. I am the guy responsible for gallium and so I'd like to clarify a few things: 1) Gallium is not an offical Edubuntu project. It is being developed by Edubuntu community volunteers, of their own accord. So far it is just a Launchpad page and like 3 days of hacking around to see what is possible to do. It *is* a part of a goal to have more Gnome educational apps that several Edubuntu community memebers have wanted to see. 2) Gallium is not a "from scratch" app. We started by looking a Kalzium (because we really admire it) and porting it's data and trying to approach it as a GTK port rather then a rewrite. There is no reason why we can't collaborate, I just wanted to have more to show the Kalzium devs then the 3 days of hacking we have now. 3) The goal of the project is to build on the success Kalzium has had. As a chemist I found gperiodic to be nowhere near as good, and it is bascially a dormant project. I initially wanted to revive gperiodic, but I saw Kalzium's data structure, wealth of information, and features were way better. I'm mearly trying to give to the GTK/Gnome world what Kalzium has done for the QT/KDE world. I personally have no preferrence between Gnome and KDE, and I'm really not trying to start a DE war. I just saw a need and thought maybe I could help fill it. As for the future of KDE-Edu, it has been tossed around in Edubuntu development meetings as to what to do. We are in desperate need of .iso space, but we have not seen how it would even be possible to replace KDE-Edu, even if we wanted to. KDE-Edu is the best educational suite available currently. The problems for Edubuntu, IMO are the added libs (which isn't huge but when we are fighting for every MB it makes a difference), and the lack of consistency/integration in having KDE apps on a Gnome desktop. Obviously the awesomeness of KDE-Edu has overwhelmed those problems thus far. I will defer to Oliver and Rodrigo for more information on this subject as I'm just a community member. -Jordan (aka LaserJock) P.S. I cc'd you as I wasn't sure if you were subscribed. -- edubuntu-devel mailing list edubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
