[plug] Linux ideology (was: EduBDO/SIGfest)

[James Devenish]

In message <5.1.0.14.2.20030527100940.02b5dec0 at cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
on Tue, May 27, 2003 at 10:35:33AM +0800, Denis Brown wrote:
> To make this more on-Linux-topic, the above, Kalzium especially, is 

Australian advocates may have to consider localisation and accuracy when
it comes to educational tools. I know nothing about KDE Edutainment, but
if it were to be demonstrated as an educational resource in Australia
then surely it needs to be available in Australian English (spelling and
grammar) and use international standardised units (for example).
Obviously this is something for which commercial Windows application
developers have spent considerable resources. A specialised tool (such
as Kalzium) surely needs to be accurate in its areas of speciality (as
opposed to an encylopaedia, which may have vary amounts of detail and
accuracy).

It concerns me that a good product may be written 'only for KDE' (I
don't know if that is how it really is, but it sounds like it) because
that ties it to a particular window desktop -- and isn't that one of the
things that's philosophically wrong with proprietary locked-in systems?
It would be nice to know that the 'back end' logic and data for
education tools were actually in a shared resource, because then there
would be fewer separate lots of code and data to develop, and people
could happily access those resources using whatever desktop (or command
line) they wished. I realise that KDE may currently have a "competitive
egde" because no one might bother to extract the data from Kalzium and
make it available under Windows. But they should be able to do such a
thing, since it is free software, isn't it? Therefore, surely the
advantage of having educational tools available with Linux is not that
those tools are anything proprietary or unique, but that they are
available in combination with Linux's other advantages. Therefore, they
need to demonstrate essential competitive as educational tools.

On the topic of accuracy, one of the screenshots at
<http://edu.kde.org/kalzium/screenshots.php>
contains the following information:

"A mol is a certain quantity of a material. 1 mol of a material contains
accurately 6.022x10^23 particles of this material. The number
6.022x10^23 is chosen as the number of objects, because an element
having the same weight in grams as its atomic weight contains this many
atoms."

Maybe that is an American definition, because the definition of an SI
mole (which is what seems to be used in Australian schools and
universities) would be different. More like:

"The mole is a unit that quantifies the presence of fundamental
particles of matter (such as atoms or molecules). One mole (1mol) of a
substance consists of approximately 6.022x10^23 particles (Avogadro's
number). The mole is convenient because the mass of one mole of an
element (its molar mass) is equal to its relative atomic mass."