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Gates and Others Offer $150k For Open Source School Software
WebMink writes "With an impending deadline for America's schools to satisfy new federal reporting requirements on academic achievement, a new alliance of state educators is creating a system of open source software to help schools gather and submit the data that the rules require. To get the whole thing started, the Gates Foundation and Carnegie are funding two $75,000 awards for the open source developers who create the in-school software. The winners could also become the linchpins of a new industry in academic software."
We need more millionaires like you! Gongrats Bill Gates!
They squeeze an entire K-12 curriculum into 4GB storage, because they must.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Took a glimpse at TFA looking for details about the 2 application packages ...
Package #1 seems to be an administrative type of software - Student Data Aggregation Calculator
If I am not wrong, I think that has already been produced.
Back in the 1990's there was an open-sourced school program movement and they produced a lot of software, for students as well as for the teachers / school administrators.
I am still trying to recall the name ...
As for the second application ... they haven't even decided yet.
And the worse part of the whole thing is --- the whole thing sounded like they want the software to run on Microsoft Windows.
Please correct me if I am wrong. Thank you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If u want "depopulation" u can start with yourself. Supports GMOs but won't eat it himself.
How are GMO's related to depopulation? GMO's are designed to increase the effective food output of our land, which is a requirement for continued population growth. Maybe you're thinking about the sterility gene that Monsanto patented, but this is designed to be used by the plants and you've never inherited a gene from food so their attempts at patent protection don't impact you're ability to compete with the Dougars.
Just a reminder.
http://www.schooltool.org/
>u
Anyone who is this lazy can be fully ignored as a moron.
GMOs are linked to diseases and cancer. Google France GMO recent news. Best way to kill people(depopulation) is through the food, water, vaccines, and pharmaceutical drugs. I don't want the kool-aid Jim Jones.
Oh, I get it... All those technologies invented over the last century. Vaccines, genetically modified crops, artificial fertilizer, fluorine, and medical drugs... these have all been apart of science's greatest failure of reducing the world's population.
Maybe this is why we keep that last bit of smallpox, so that we can refine it's lethality and finally scientists will kill off humanity.
It's good thing you're AC, otherwise the government might be able to track you down.
What about open source school books? That's much more needed, at least in Spain which is where I live and parents have to pay a lot for books that change every two years that treat about basic information which hasn't really changed in decades. It would be much better that teachers themselves organized and wrote open source books that they can either cheaply print or put in ebooks. Signed: edulix.
GMO's are designed to increase the effective food output of our land
No they are not. GMOs are designed to make money to the corporation selling them. If it happens that a GMO crop has higher yields, it's just a nice side benefit. One common trait of GMO crops are that they are immune to certain poisons (herbicides and insecticide) sold by the same corporation. Thus, the farmers can use more poison on their fields without killing their crops. This may increase crop yields, but it also has a nasty side effect. Even though the corporation claims that the poison will never be able to find its way into the ground water, most eventually do find their way.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Not to mention that GMO crops contain extremely high levels of dihydrogen monoxide!
GMO's are designed to increase the effective food output of our land
No they are not. GMOs are designed to make money to the corporation selling them. If it happens that a GMO crop has higher yields, it's just a nice side benefit. One common trait of GMO crops are that they are immune to certain poisons (herbicides and insecticide) sold by the same corporation. Thus, the farmers can use more poison on their fields without killing their crops. This may increase crop yields, but it also has a nasty side effect. Even though the corporation claims that the poison will never be able to find its way into the ground water, most eventually do find their way.
Yes, they're designed to make money, we live in a Capitalistic society, everything that companies do is designed to maximize profit. Now, how do farmers make money? I think they sell stuff. I wonder what they sell and where it comes from.... oh, right, food, made in the land.
GMO crops cost more to the farmers due to R&D and them not legally being able to reuse many of the seeds, and not only that, but their value is about half of that for the organics at stores. You'd think that there is some way that farmers recuperate these additional losses, like maybe they can sell more stuff.
Why would Gates support anything that undermines Microsoft...or am I missing some angle here where M$ wins anyway?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Open Source != GPL
I agree with you in that there are many libre software licenses, and that the GPL is (albeit very popular) only one of them, just like ASL.
However, I think the real question regarding the license is: If you were to develop any of the applications which qualify for the bounty from scratch, and **you were expected to transfer the copyright to the client**... Would you charge 75K?
If you consider the bounty "a fair price" for such situation, then (although I dislike ASL in general) I think the license choice would be acceptable, as they would be the client as in any other casa.
On the contrary, if the bounty is lower than your expected price, I would consider that choosing ASL (a license that allows to transform the resulting code to non-libre) over a license that guarantees that the application will always be libre while allowing related work to be developed under other licenses (like LGPL or GPL+classpath exception) makes this a clear case of cheap labor and deception.
So, experienced developers... Would you consider 75K a good price in such a situation?
this is just showoff - why dont gates make ms opensource and merge to gnu
Whooopdiiiiidoooodah!
The below is a rant. You've been warned.
The SLC developer "documentation" was written by bozos who have absolutely no perspective outside of their enterprise clusterfuck swamp. Here's a representative example:
resource - Under the industry standard representational state transfer (REST) software architecture, this is any meaningful concept around which a user interaction can occur.
So, yeah, I get it, a resource may be, um, an argument. Yeah, a verbal argument. I mean come on, try and argue that it's not a "meaningful concept" around which "user interaction" can occur. I mean I'm a user and I can have verbal arguments, duh. Another one:
standard field - A field that is a part of a resource representation, as determined by the schema of the resource.
Dude, a standard field is a field that's defined in the schema of the resource. That's it. Stop with the wordleaks.
The documentation is from someone who can't say what they fucking mean, someone who should have had their fingers slapped with a wooden ruler in their high school writing classes until they fucking got the message. I don't care that they are enterprise geeks who have to deal with various abominations and progress meetings day in, day out. Learn how to write or shut the fuck up.
Sorry, it's this kind of bullshit contentless drivel that drives me nuts, that equally drove Feynman nuts BTW, and for a good reason. RJF hated elaborate abstract frameworks built up around trivial ideas, used for nothing else but aggrandizing the trivial ideas. It's mental masturbation, it's done by people who don't realize (or pretend so) that there are clever folk out there who see that the king is naked, that all those abstractions are built around a single piece of poo in the loo.
Say it like it is. Use common language where such works. Don't wrap things up in abstractions for the sake of abstractions. Sure, I do understand that an API is an abstraction, but you don't have to use a yet another layer of abstraction when describing stuff for crying out loud! And don't fucking make a concept-explaining document something that's split up in a thousand html pages with a couple paragraphs on each! If I'm new to that stuff, I'll want to print it out, spread it out, and work with it. How the fuck do you work with a thousand html files? Do they think they are so fucking important that anyone who wants to touch their heavenly documentation is supposed to write fucking scripts just to collate their driver into a useful form? The only thing missing in their docs is ads. It's make it just as useless as, say, eHow.
It seems like the projects aren't particularly complex, but the barrier to entry is high because documentation sucks and unless you have first hand knowledge with enterprise mental masturbation, you'll spend tons of time figuring out the trivialities that could be spelled out in a 5 page pdf (vs. their idiotic bazillion page HTML thing only available in pieces that pretty much only lack ads to make a complete serving of typical internet barf).
Never mind that their dev website is a typical contentless bullshit "socially driven" page where you can't figure what the fuck the whole thing is about. I mean, they have a freaking twitter feed there. Who the heck needs a twitter feed and pics from, apparently, Times Square, on a dev page is beyond me, but hey, when you lack real content you're free to put up junk space fill, of course.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I did it for marks and i passed and .....well i am president of something aren't I? ...gates own people at windows will steal your idea so make sure you place it under a gpl lisence NOT BSD
NOT even a novel idea
[citation needed]
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Wouldn't a guy with a net worth of 66 Billion dollars offer more than $150,000 to help this effort if he was serious about philanthropy? Wouldn't he also guarantee that the cost of deployment of the system would be covered, rather than picked up by the taxpayers.
This is all standard Gates tactics, as old as the hills. The reason why he has 66 billion is because he has made a history of drug dealer tactics involving tricking people into thinking they are getting something great for free and then keeping them hooked on his garbage. And make no mistake about it, what was produced under his watch was quite intentionally, garbage.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'd like the school to teach how to produce open source software in Visual Studio, Visual basic & others. Also, at the higher grades, teach them about OSs and work on developing and fine tuning ReactOS (w/ a target spec of Windows 7, not beyond). That way, at the end of the day, schools would ideally be able to write and maintain not just their own software, but own OS as well, fine tuning it to whatever computers they have, while being able to use all the Windows software already out there.
He does bring up a good point, though. Since education is (usually) a government mandated requirement, why not have certain material that's in curricula available freely online in form of e-books, which is basic & common to all K-12 levels? Maybe hosted & driven by UNESCO? That way, kids regardless of where they are can access them, so long as they have tablets, and the OLPC can become an OTPC instead, which would be a lot more achievable. Since these books could be in, amongst other things, a pdf format, any tablet should be able to read them. So make this standard, and remove a lot of the costs in education, and transfer them towards training teachers worldwide to use those as tools to enhance understanding of the students.
GMOs are linked to diseases and cancer.
Your logic is sound. You only fail to mention the intermediary step of, oh, I don't know, not dying of starvation? Thus managing to get to old age and then developing diseases and cancer?
Here's another nice statistic for you: 100% of assassinations and murders are linked to human beings. Let's stop the madness! Cease breeding!
Google France GMO recent news. Best way to kill people(depopulation) is through the food, water, vaccines, and pharmaceutical drugs. I don't want the kool-aid Jim Jones.
True. Which is why every day there are fewer humans on Earth! ... Wait...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
No. It is like breaking up a penny into very small parts and giving away one of the pieces.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Intriguing #151819. Do show your work for full credit. Be seeing you!
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Linux Education software is already established for schools collages.
In Spain, Hundreds of Thousand of Students Get Ubuntu Access.
Used by 600,000 students and 75,000 teachers, the Ubuntu-based operating system, Guadalinex EDU, is now an accepted standard in schools throughout the region. By the end of 2012, 4,000 schools, around 1.5 million students and nearly 200,000 teachers will be using Guadalinex every day.
http://Edubuntu.org
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Education-Li-f-e
Zorin education
http://zorin-os.com
Fedora have an education project
are GMO's related to depopulation? GMO's are designed to increase the effective food output of our land
They don't do that, though. They may have done it over a very short time, but in the long run they actually decrease food output. Issue the first, superbugs. Insects are already becoming resistant to BT. This happened slower before, when plants produced less of it. Issue the second, destruction of topsoil. When you use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, etc. you kill biologicals in the soil without which you cannot have healthy plant development, because those organisms which make nutrients available to the plants do not exist. Plants don't just take it out of the soil in any form they find it, it has to be "bio-available" and this is made happen by beneficial biologicals which can make up over 50% of the mass of healthy topsoil. There are two main Monsanto gene-hacks. One is BT production, which has already been proven to be not only harmful to humans (due to the increased quantities found in their tampered food) but also totally pointless over even the medium term, let alone the long term. The other is roundup resistance, whose purpose is to permit the spraying of more glyphosphate. Glyphosphate has been proven to contaminate water, has significant human health risks, and is generally present in our water nationwide. It also, as mentioned above, destroys soil diversity.
The simple truth is that whatever Monsanto might think they are doing, they have already been proven to be decreasing our ability to produce food, not to be improving it.
Maybe you're thinking about the sterility gene that Monsanto patented, but this is designed to be used by the plants
The "Terminator Gene" is the best thing Monsanto ever did, and the cleverest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the people that it was a bad thing. By definition the gene cannot spread to all life on earth, because any organism to which it might be passed on will not produce viable seed. We should have demanded that it be used in any case of gene manipulation of plants which would have solved any number of problems. It would have mitigtated the problem of genetic contamination, and no farmers would be losing their farms for doing what they do every year — saving seed from their crops to plant again next year. It shoudn't matter if a farmer found and deliberately harvested seed from roundup-ready crops, because that is how farming is done. Monsanto should have been required to solve this problem technically, not by stealing land (and this is really stealing, it's not just some bullshit infringement.)
Monsanto is pure evil, and must be destroyed. You know their latest gene-fixes are for aluminum and for agent orange? Aluminum has been discussed broadly as the ideal thing to use for weather manipulation, but it causes serious problems for living things. Agent orange we should already all know about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've read Feynman on how school book selection really works. I'm sure it's the same mindless stupidity on software.
Use the money to hire/contract someone.
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Forgive the AC for he has not finished his morning allotment of Moosehead beer. ;) Now back to my igloo.
Let's see.. that's about 4 work months for a senior developer. WHat, exactly, of usefulness are you going to get for 3-4 months work? Are you going to get usable documentation and user manuals?
Or, are you just going to leverage the volunteer efforts of others?
Or, are you just funding a study to go figure out what you should build and put some real money (many millions) behind.
Wouldn't be surprised if his buddy Sal Khan mysteriously won this award.
What we need are FEWER millionaires.
Which would allow us to have FAR FAR fewer starving and destitute.
Good Ole' Waterfall model. Never steered a software project wrong.
The Gates Foundation checklist:
We support open source software in education. CHECK
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653
not going to go into details here but MS basically did a buncha stuff to lock out NOTMS from the browser market up to and including delaying Key info from Computer OEMs if they preloaded a NONMS web browser.
you want details and Cites follow the link
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
s/we can count/retarded run on sentences with no punctuation, eh/
Er, ah .. no. I'll use an actual brain and laugh at the fact that you couldn't name a single competitor and actually thought you would hide that fact by doing what amounts to the equivalent of comparing the quality of a specific tire for Ferraris against the engine of a VW Bug.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
First of all, OS/2 was a joint project between Microsoft and IBM, meaning it doesn't qualify as a competitor to Microsoft unless you are saying Microsoft competes with themselves. Second, it illustrates my point since it was never sold bundled with PCs because it couldn't be due to anti-compete clauses with all the major manufacturers. Finally, while they may have initially been putting true effort into the project, Microsoft eventually deliberately dragged their feet in the development of OS/2 to slow IBM down while they worked on Widgets95 and Windows Nice/Try. Or, to put it in a less plain and honest way, the way they say it in the more politically correct way in the wikipedia article on OS/S: " In the end, Microsoft decided to recast NT OS/2 3.0 as Windows NT, leaving all future OS/2 development to IBM."
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The richest man alive and a prestigious university offer to pay development costs a single educational software package, while N parties develop each their own, and he gets to choose who is the best, ie who he'd like to sponsor. GATES THE ORPHAN SAVER! -_-
Pretty sure a good number of people are biting their words about Mr. Gates some right now. I want the best for him. I'm glad he is giving so much to these charities. He caught some flack for doing research about toilets, even from me. Lol, anyway, I think it's a good thing for him. There are a lot of preachers over here who think giving penance is a bad thing, and it can be at times. But think about it this way, Jesus told a rich man once to give it all away and leave it behind. They omitted the apocrypha for this from our Bibles, and because people prayed for the dead, when in Revelations it clearly says in the first chapter that you should not fear because He has the keys to Hades and death, etc. The main reason many people left wasn't even because of that exactly. It was because they were being mistreated in general, and they felt as though they should blame the pope. And there were horrible people who would simply give a chunk here and there and go out and do a bunch more terrible stuff, and they thought that was alright. I think it's good for Mr. Gates, indeed. No, I don't think all rich men will go to hell, but it does say that it's harder for a rich man to enter into paradise than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Why? Money is just like crack. Give some more away.
"Minimum Application Requirements .. Applications must leverage SLC technologies. Full developer documentation can be found at dev.slcedu.org"
"Last week a subset of the SLC dev team headed north from OSCON to Seattle to host an SLC Camp for about 100 people at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Our goal was to give members of the team there a chance to ramp on the SLC technologies and their implications for K-12 education"
AccountKiller
"Linux may be a serious contender for servers, but it's still a niche player in desktop"
...
Ubuntu from three years ago
Ubuntu vs. Gnome Shell
AccountKiller
"Software components of the SLC technology will be made available under an Apache 2.0 permissive open source license, except to the extent that releasing code puts privacy and security of student data at risk .. Applications developed by third parties that are interoperable with but separate from the SLC technology will not be subject to the SLC open source license ". link
AccountKiller
Yes, they're designed to make money, we live in a Capitalistic society, everything that companies do is designed to maximize profit.
Bullshit, most people lived in some version of a mixed economy, and not everything is done by for-profit organisations. There is no inherent reason why you couldn't nationalise all farms and food producers.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No. It is like breaking up a penny into very small parts and giving away one of the pieces.
Yes, if he'd made the prize a couple of billion, I'm sure you'd have got much higher quality software out of it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Or he could have - you know - just hired qualified people to design and implement a decent system. You clearly have no understanding of what is really going on here, or how it is simply a way for Gates and his buddies to make bank. Do some actual research, and you will see that this is no act of philanthropy. Your first clue that it wasn't an act of philanthropy should have been that it involved and had the endorsement of Bill Gates.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If they put this up for contract it, they would get _zero_ serious bids. That shows exactly how serious they are. This was a cheap way of garnering media attention with a hot internet topic.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
You should. Because what they are asking for is for you to design the use cases, wireframes, features, and functions.
Given access to a working install, and a 2-hour meeting, I could probably do this inside a week plus the API learning curve. But that's not what they want. They want you to assume requirements, design around those requirements, and present your work and hope it gets selected.
If you are selected, they will then use the stack of proposals to alter your proposal, since you
The feedback will undoubtedly combine great ideas from every one of the un-paid proposals, and you will be stuck with the due date they gave.
You will either work yourself to death, fail to deliver, or deliver and be disqualified. Unless you are already the pre-selected vendor, for which the requirements were written.
A potentially good conversation topic degenerates into garbage. Never mind the fact that the Gates foundation is one of the most benevolent organizations in the world and has definitely done more good than any of you slackjaw sorry ass haters have. Get off your porcelain pedestals and finally come to the realization that your opinion does not matter to anyone in the world. Including mine.
Back to the topic, this is definitely something that SOMEONE should be doing. Every existing player in the market that I can think of is primed to have their lunch eaten. Existing packages are not very good, take a ton of effort of integrate and support, and so hardware hungry that they are obviously poorly written and not worth their weight in salt.