Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (89 mails)

[Phil Driscoll <phil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 01 October 2002 1:31 pm, Grahame Leon-Smith at Free Computers 
wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I agree with Ian.  The answer is to persuade the people producing
> educational software to produce a Linux version as well as Windows, but
> this is a chicken and egg situation in that as far as the producers are
> concerned there are not enough schools using Linux to justify the cost of
> producing a Linux version.

Persuading people who produce educational software to stop doing that and 
start producing web based tools using open standards which do the same jobs, 
is perhaps more likely to produce results than getting them to take on a new 
platform. Most educational software producers in the uk are very small, and 
many will have just one programmer. The big companies tend to either sell 
externally sourced software, or buy the small companies and take them in 
house.

Persuading (and even offering to help) developers to produce web based 
versions of their stuff on the grounds that the web is the future, might be 
easier than convincing them that Linux is the future.

For the last 5 years we (Dial Solutions) have spent lots of time developing 
web based Java versions of My World, and some of our other products. Although 
our Windows sales still dwarf the Java stuff, at least we get the feel-good 
factor of having (probably) the only mainstream primary application which 
will run on anything.

Cheers
-- 
Phil Driscoll