Skolelinux participation at the Edubuntu Summit

[Sergio Talens-Oliag]

El Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 09:35:52PM +0200, Knut Yrvin va escriure:
> lørdag 9. juli 2005, 23:36, skrev Sergio Talens-Oliag:
> >   Sadly that means that a lot of offers will be based on the
> > commercial distributions (I've heard rumours about Novell and the
> > message from Quim about Ubuntu)
> 
> Not necessarily. The three regions in Spain that runs, or gonna run a
> Linux-distro in their schools, have done that based on a customisation
> of Debian. The same is the situation in Munich[1][2].

  I know that, I work on the development of one of them, LliureX, the
  distribution of the Valencian Community, but our case is quite different
  from the Catalan one.
  
  In Valencia the project is done from the inside of the administration, with
  internal people and some external employees (I'm one of them), but the
  Catalan government wants to externalize the full project (development,
  deployment and support) and I've been told that the companies that have
  options on this kind of offer are not going to use Debian as a base.

  Anyway, I only know that from conversations with people there, maybe things
  are not as I've said and some of the offers are not based on commercial
  distributions, we will see what happens soon.

> To make this possible, you have to ha business skills that not allays
> is common in the free software community. The reason for this is
> almost entirely a demographic issue, where most of the free software
> developers are under 30 years old, and you sometimes need more
> experience with business that comes as a result of experience in real
> life businesses.

  Sure, I know a lot of people that is very entusiastic about free software,
  but sometimes the advocacy they do is counterproductive, as they don't speak
  the same language as old school people.

  Another problem is that for government projects of this size you need to
  be a big company or the union of multiple companies has to arrive to a
  critical mass, and Free Software Companies are not that big nor used to work
  together on that proposals.
  
  Fortunately this is changing in all areas: big companies are starting to
  understand how to make money with free software and I've also seen that
  small companies are winning public contracts when working in teams,
  sometimes with a lot of partners, sometimes working with big companies.

> Sometimes the skills needed also "contradicts" how software is bought
> traditionally. The costumer believes that they have to buy the
> software, when free software could be "sold" with a maintainance
> agreement. People that buy software don't always know about open
> innovation, and how this could be done.

  I feel that in this particular case there is a lot of people that knows how
  the Free Software bussines works, inside and outside the administration, but
  maybe the people in charge have that *traditional* view you are talking
  about and the use of free software on education is more a political
  compromise than something the people in charge believes in.
  
-- 
Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto at debian.org>   <http://people.debian.org/~sto/>
Key fingerprint = 29DF 544F  1BD9 548C  8F15 86EF  6770 052B  B8C1 FA69
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