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

[John Knight]

>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).

Heh, our approach in KDE en_GB team was, "just rename it from en_GB to en_AU 
and no-one will know the difference", there was only the odd thing like 
'Kangaroo' etc, and that's only involved in dictionary files, certainly not 
in GUI strings. ;-) Thankfully not our job....

>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.
>

I fully agree with that one, and I think there's still a bit too much GNOME 
vs. KDE rivalry, although things are certainly getting better now, 
especially with shared menu entries. I think shared libraries that are 
common between desktops is the best way to go, but the only concern here I 
think is how far down the coding goes for the data files for such projects, 
if they're Qt based files, then it makes things a little hard, requiring a 
major overhaul of the data files and re-coding on the part of both desktops' 
GUI frontends.

_________________________________________________________________
ninemsn Extra Storage is now available. Get larger attachments - 
send/receive up to 2MB attachments (up to 100 percent more per e-mail). Go 
to  http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/home&pgmarket=en-au