Some REAl general thoughts on the KDE-EDU world

[Aleix Pol]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 11:49 AM, Wolfgang Romey <hier at wolfgangromey.de>wrote:

> Hallo,
>
> although covering important topics the mails with the subject "some general
> thoughts concerning the kde-edu world" did'nt hold what the subject
> promised.
> That is why iItry to deliver some thoughts, which I think are more general.
>
>  In my opinion KDE-EDU has to consider on what hardware the software will
> run.
> As you probably know, tablet-computer and smartphones are getting more and
> more important as learning devices. And that is a thread to learning, as
> they
> are more and more closed. In the future the googles, apples, bertelsmanns,
> ...
> will determine, what software can run on their devices, if we do not have
> real
> open and Free devices; and that often will not be Free software.
>
> There are some devices, which are not so closed like the Jolla-Phone and
> Fairphone. There are adruino and rasberry pi, which are relativly open and
> a
> huge success. But as far as I know, there is no device which is embedded in
> the Free Software community or KDE-community.
>
> You all know the struggles for the vivaldi tablet, which can not be
> realized
> as the improv-board can not be realized, as there are not enough orders or
> donations. Both devices would be as open as possible today and embedded in
> the
> KDE-Community. We would have devices running Plasma-Active and the bodega
> store, which could offer educational software and other material.
>
> improv is the key to this. So in my opinion it is very important, to make
> it
> possible.
>
> I recommend reading Carl Symons excellent article on the dot again
> (http://dot.kde.org/2014/01/22/open-hardware-kde)
>
> and "The benefits of EOMA-68 Modularisation to Education" on
> http://rhombus-tech.net/articles/eoma68_in_education/
>
> I would be thankful, if I get any reactions.
> --
> Wolfgang Romey
>
> Anhänge bitte nur in offenen Formaten wie z.B. die OpenDocument-Formate
>
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>
That's true. And it's not true only for KDE Edu but KDE software in
general. In fact, I already know about a deployment in my region that
didn't go for KDE because lacking hardware that fits us.

That's only not a problem because of tablets, same thing happens with
laptops and PC's in general. This case is less of a moving target at the
moment, but still problematic.

I don't think it's a manpower problem though, FOSS communities are
well-known for failing at driving hardware development and getting the
industry pushing it on board. Like you said, there's been some success
stories regarding "libre" hardware like Ardunio or RPi, but these are also
not really something we can offer to end-user like our manifesto [1]
suggests.

I will be happy to see any reactions as well. Personally, I see it as a
perpetuating problem and different projects failing to solve them for
different reasons. Probably because we're offering projects, not products.

On the bright side, it seems like the situation might improve a great deal
when we get to adopt Wayland and get a stack closer to Android.

Aleix

[1] http://manifesto.kde.org/
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