On 2012-05-18, at 12:15 , Roberto Galoppini wrote: >> >> >> As well, wouldn't it be great that over summer we do enough so that when >> school starts again here in the Northern Hemisphere, students and faculty >> can actually use something that is all about working together for a better >> place? >> > > Yea, any specific idea in mind?
Yes. Many. What I'd suggest is not to target a particular regional market but a logical one. In this case, let's look at, oh, say, the Portuguese deployment of the Magellan education netbooks. As you recall, earlier instances had Win/MS Office in one partition, Lin/OOo in the other. That implicitly and immediately deprecated free software, as there was little reason to use it. As Paulo has told me, though, things have changed. But the basic elements are the same: gov't. promoted software (now more free) and devices that are inexpensive enough (esp. aftter support) so that they can be widely deployed. Portugal is small—about the size of a Beijing suburb, at least in terms of population (10M) and Brazil is big, nearly 20 times that size. There is also Angola and other former Lusophone polities around the world. My argument is to promote a solution that is, at first, software focused. * AOO in Portuguese (Br/Pt) with local, when possible, support. (If it is not there, we start it or use global options until it is—and it comes into being because the market is or ought to be obvious enough.) * Devices: Intel sided publicly with LibreOffice but earlier had wanted to work with OOo. Frankly, I doubt Intel cares one way or another which flavour is the best but simply wants a suite that has humongous global usage and also crucial community and industrial momentum. We have both. > So, we contact Intel. I know the people at the Tizen (formerly Meego) > project, and I'm sure others here do, too. Tizen is essentially a mobilized > Linux, I believe, and if Intel has worked to get LO on it—I don't know—then > whatever it has done would probably work with AOO. The point is to have a package: software on hardware. It need not be mobile per se. The education laptops, too, may not—I don't think they do—use Tizen. The most important point, as I see it, is to have a product that is ready for education—students and teachers—and only secondarily, the hardware. I put it this way, even though I obviously believe in the integrated ensemble, just because the hardware element is so susceptible to change. As well, hardware decisions are usually made more than a year in advance; I don't know when software decisions are made in general but I guess is that the cycle is a little shorter. I think developing this general idea is needed, of course, and to focus on PT is not essential. However, my reason for doing so rests upon what had already been done by Portugal's prior gov't., by the PT users/OOo group, by the wide scale and exciting deployments in Brazil, by Angola's earlier interest in OOo and by Intel's live interest in producing a product that can have global popularity. But all the players here could be replaced by others, of course. And the language could be, I don't know, Italian :-) or even the English they speak up here in Canada, eh? Cheers, Louis > > Roberto >
