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DebianEdu Announced

Posted by michael on from the apt-get-install-ucblogo dept.

Bill Kendrick writes "There's been an announcement on debian-devel-announce about a new subproject, DebianEdu, which "aims to make Debian the best distribution available for educational use." As a developer with some stuff in Debian Jr., I'm happy to see some focus on an honest-to-goodness education project!"

4 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. It's about time by frascone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It seems like the educational market has been forgotten lately. I remember when I was in school, Boreland was offering Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, or the newest thing, Turbo C++ for $69-$99. This was when Microsoft C was around $500.

    Everyone I knew had a Turbo compiler. Microsoft lost major ground. And, since the students were most comfortable with Boreland, that was, of course, what they recommended to their future employeers.

    But, for some reason, companies have recently been neglecting the educational market. Kudos to Debian for re-starting the trend.

    1. Re:It's about time by Derwen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Debian is a bit too late. They will have to be extremely aggressive if they would want folks like us to switch over.
      Debian, aggressive?
      ROTFL :-)))

      Debian GNU/Linux got to be the one true distro (TM), and the most popular with admins, simply by being the best :-)
      That's the only strategy Debian has ever had (backed up, of course, by its social contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)) - and that seems to have worked just fine ;-)

      In all seriousness, it's great that Debian are doing this - and great that Red Hat do something similar. When every child has access to a Free *nix at school (or even access to a school - never mind a computer) will be the time to start bickering about which GNU/Linux distro has the biggest dick in the edu world ;-)
      - Derwen

      --
      http://fsfeurope.org/
  2. Need to outperform closed source options by jukal · · Score: 5, Informative
    I would think that not all of the benefits of open source are true in education, as in business use for example. Which means that the open source option needs to outperform the commercial option by other criterias (functionality, performance, feature set, reliability) - not price.

    As commercial vendors tend to provide schools and universities with cheap or free licenses for educational uses - to make the students familiar with their products so that they would buy them when they finally graduate and enter work-life. So, am I terribly wrong if I assume that there is not the cost benefit or atleast it is not very significant?

  3. A Little Late by Daemonik · · Score: 4, Informative
    As a developer with some stuff in Debian Jr., I'm happy to see some focus on an honest-to-goodness education project!
    There's at least 2 other Education oriented distributions already. Blue Linux and Seul.