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

[James Devenish]

In message <20030527032404.GA23656 at guild.uwa.edu.au>
on Tue, May 27, 2003 at 11:24:04AM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
> It would be nice to know that the 'back end' logic and data for
> education tools were actually in a shared resource,

And even if some flagship educational tools were part of KDE (for
example), it would be advantageous if the data, or at least updates to
the data, were not limited to the KDE release cycle (since that imposes
packaging and installation issues). It would be potentially useful (both
for general currency and for making corrections to errors) if the most
recent data were always available. Even if updates had to be advertised
as "six monthly" in order for the general public to feel as though they
were getting "value" :) I mention this as a cultural technique (which we
already see in practice) rather than something to be relevant to only
one piece of software. (Aside: note that the periodic table is not
immutable---there have been political controversies such that you might
have got the same periodic table if you had asked a different person).