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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."
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 !
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.
No we don't. That is a piddly amount of money compared to what Gates made while stifling innovation through unfair business practices. And now he's not even paying someone to write the software. He's paying for an award - in other words, a competition, where many people will put in much work and in the end only one or two get paid. Can you imagine asking ten people to build a house to your specifications and then buying only the one you like best? No? Then why is it acceptable to have production software developed that way?
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.
The software that they release is under the Apache licence. It was you who brought up GPL. No one else had even mentioned it.
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.
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.
You are missing an angle here.
These angles don't bring open source into direct competition with Microsoft, so it doesn't undermine them. (FLOSS operating systems and office suites do compete with Microsoft, so that stuff would never receive a bounty from Gates.)
On the other hand, Gates seems to have a genuine concern for education. A huge problem in education is acquiring modern tools and delivering modern tools. Education providers are a bunch of leeches, providing sub-par products at prices that would make you cringe. (Prices are often in the range of Adobe's or Microsoft's professional offerings, yet the products are barely consumer grade.)
So, no conflict of interest. Get a warm-fuzzy feeling. Why not support it?
[citation needed]
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Step 1, embrace... My how we forget.
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.
Yes. You are missing a lot here. First of all, Open Source doesn't mean "doesn't run on Windows". In fact it could mean, and almost certainly will mean, only works on Windows. The implementation could be an Access database application, for example. Also, the days when Microsoft has to win for Gates to win are long gone. There are many other ways for Gates to wave the right hand and do something behind the scenes with his left.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So Gates has significant experience to bring to the table.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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
This message brought to you form canada HOME of we can count.....
. . . But not spell
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.
In case anybody thinks that this is a case of sour grapes and that the charity is the important bit, you can think of this as a variation on the broken window fallacy. Sure, Gates is donating to charity, but to obtain the money to do so, he used business practices which set the industry back several years. Overall, it's a net loss to society.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Wouldn't be surprised if his buddy Sal Khan mysteriously won this award.
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
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
If you think that's a flaw in this argument, I suspect you misunderstood it. The fact that he spent the money on charity when he didn't have to does not erase the harm he did to obtain that money. No matter what he spends the money on, it's a net loss to society.
That is not what I am doing.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
>Er, ah .. no. I'll use an actual brain and laugh at the fact that you couldn't name a single competitor
Is that the same actual brain that makes you assert that Apple was and is not a competitor to Microsoft because they sell hardware?
Now that's phenomenally clueless.
The fact that there was no good competitor says more about the competition than it says about Microsoft, at least till the mid nineties.
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! -_-
FTFY
You are very young Mr. 1487801. You clearly weren't around during the 80s and 90s, and definately have no understanding of the market at the time. That being said. Yes. I'm one of those weird guys who doesn't think that car manufacturers are in competition with tire manufacturers.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"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
The worst unfair business practice was charging hardware manufacturers for a copy of Windows for every machine shipped even if it didn't actually have Windows on it. That one contract clause indirectly put human computer development back twenty years.
Sure, Gates is donating to charity, but to obtain the money to do so, he used business practices which set the industry back several years
He made computing affordable for the masses, which is why the geek snobs on slashdot hate him. Faced with a choice between using windows on a generic PC or spending five times that on some cool UNIX workstation, the market broadly decided to go for the former.
It's consumer capitalism in action.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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
You should probably read a little more about Bill Gates.
Yeah, his alcohol and drug addiction, history of rape and child abuse, known support for Nazi politics and unhealthy interest in Satanism are well documented. Oh, wait...no, he just made a lot of money selling software, which on slashdot is the worst crime known to humanity.
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.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Just because Microsoft locked up the low-end market it doesn't follow that Microsoft were necessary for the low-end market to exist. In fact the opposite is true - there were other low-end competitors that were made artificially more expensive by Microsoft due to their abusive relationships with OEMs (whereby the OEMs had to pay Microsoft even for computers that had competing operating systems installed).
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Does that mean Apple had no competition too? Then why did it almost die? What alternatives to Apple machines did people buy? Or did would-be Apple customers all turn into Luddites and stopped buying computers?
Yes. There was no competition with Apple in the 80s. That is correct. It didn't die. I'm posting this on a Macbook right now, moron.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
I said "almost died". Shouldn't have expected more from someone who posts like they've failed reading comprehension.
You are the one who cannot comprehend what was written. I'll slow it down for you. You said it almost died. I then said it didn't die. Now show me how my pointing out that while it went through tough times it didn't die represents a lack of comprehension. Seriously, I cannot argue with you anymore. I feel like I'm picking on a mentally retarded person.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You're talking about a net loss to society, but you're not doing karma bookkeeping? You've completely lost me here.
You failed to explain why Apple *almost* died when it didn't have any competition, and you then implied that 'but Apple didn't die' is a valid rebuttal to me asking you what almost killed Apple. That shows your lack of reading comprehension. Again, what almost killed Apple if not Windows?
Try telling any decent tech folks you meet that Apple does not compete with Microsoft Windows because it makes hardware. Then watch as they laugh out loud and talk behind your back about your mental retardation.
I also failed to explain quantum physics to you. You don't have the understanding of history required to even figure out that you cannot compare Apple today to Apple circa 1988, never mind the basic logic to follow any explanation. The short bus is waiting for you. Off you go ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You're pathetic, treally. No one wanted to compare Apple then and now, the question was "Was and is Apple a competitor/rival to Microsoft Windows then and now". And your retarded answer was no, and then you try to work around that bs with nonsense rationalizations and personal attacks. People's choices while wanting to buy computers for the past 25 years is not quantum physics You still cannot answer my question "What almost killed Apple? Was it not Microsoft?".
Someone told me Slashdot is mostly left with retarded circlejerking karmawhoring anti-MS zealots who mod each other up and that people with half a clue about reality have already left. Maybe I should just leave you and others in peace here and agree with you, you're beyond retarded. Just continue with your stupid karmawhoring posts like a frog in a well.
Again, it wasn't Microsoft. It couldn't possibly be Microsoft. Microsoft wrote applications that ran on Apple hardware. They also made an OS that did not run on Apple hardware. Microsoft is currently trying to recast itself as a company capable of being in competition with Apple once again. They have failed miserably for the simple reason that they cannot possibly do it. They are incompetent morons. You should apply there. I'd strongly recommend you.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Thanks for a better response, though I don't agree completely with you. Apple painted itself into the DTP corner neither by design and nor by choice. They just couldn't deal with the tsunami of IBM-PC clones from Compaq, Dell, HP etc. that MS very cunningly licensed DOS/Windows to. Apple's computers were general purpose computers able to run any applications, but they failed to attract developers like MS was able to and the prices kept it within the reach of only graphic designers and not the general public. In that sense, they were and are competing with Microsoft. A college kid goes to Best Buy and looks around for a laptop, and might just pick the Macbook Air instead of an Asus Ultrabook. Not only DTP users use Macs, and that's especially true nowadays.
How many of these kids are DTP users? http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f49/Voodoogoon/big-mac-class.jpg
http://osxdaily.com/2010/08/05/70-of-college-freshman-use-macs/
They also make an OS which is a miserable failure. The only reason Microsoft is still in existence is due to anti-competitive behavior and vendor lock-in.
Microsoft is currently trying to recast itself as a company capable of being in competition with Apple once again. They have failed miserably for the simple reason that they cannot possibly do it. They are incompetent morons
While MS did have luck like IBM picking DOS for the OS, they did make software in those times which was simply better than the competition. Office Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. lagged behind their competitors like WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, etc. but by the typical 4th version or so, they were just better in objective ways and thus won the market. Did you ever try using Lotus Notes? Try it, you'd pay a million to run screaming to Outlook or Pine within a day. IE 4 and 5 were similarly better than Netscape 4 while Netscape didn't have a major version for 3 years smack in the middle of the dot com boom while implementing a new version.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Windows 95 was similarly better than any competition out there, and still OpenOffice or whatever Exchange/AD clone don't have the features and polish of MS Office/Exchange/AD.
The LAMP stack had success on the server side, but OpenOffice, Zimbra, OpenLDAP etc. have nothing on the competition. While I do agree that lock-in etc. played a role, you're underestimating the mis-steps made by competitors and that MS' software was actually better at the time it beat the rivals.
When did Microsoft acquire ASUS? I read your whole post, and some of it is well thought out, but you continue to miss the only important points.
1) Microsoft is a software company. Apple makes hardware. The two are not competitors. Period.
2) Any company that botches 90% of it's efforts and is still number one clearly got there for another reason. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that they kept their slot through anti-competetive behaviors, lies, and FUD.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun