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