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."

Comments

Re:What software ??

[Taco Cowboy]

The open-source school software movement that I mentioned on the above runs on Linux, though ...

They did set up a distro (I think it's based on slackware, it my memory didn't fail me)

I'm still trying to recall the name ... dammit !! ... brain just gone blank ....

Re:What software ??

[Gadget_Guy]

Where did you find it on the website where they said it had to run on Windows? All I found was that it had to use the SLC API, which uses the Java SDK. In theory it should run on any platform.

I could be wrong though. I am current browsing on my iPhone, and it a pain to navigate the site in on the mobile.

Re:Mr. "depopulation" and Monsatan(GMOs)

[feedayeen]

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.

Re:Gongrats to Gates and others

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What software ??

[politkal]

http://skolelinux.org/ skole linux ?

Re:What software ??

[houghi]

There are several Linux distributions directed at education/schools. Most (All?) based on existing distributions with different packages installed.

http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Education is just one of them. Using SUSE studio makes it easy to make your own.

Before SUSE Studio, there was Lincat for Catalunia. http://linkat.xtec.cat/portal/index.php. They have moved to openSUSE edu.

What a clusterfuck of documentation

[tibit]

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.

Re:What a clusterfuck of documentation

[tburkhol]

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.

Maybe we should just return to the good old days when people used to put their ideas in Latin to make them sound important. I mean, how much smarter does "e pluribus, unum" sound than "we're all together?" Now imagine a whole spec written out in Latin, with dative on every line. Gregorian monks could chant the windows API for years.

Re:What software ??

[Penguinisto]

SEUL?

I remember they had a huge push to put Linux in schools back in 2000 or so. They also run/host Schoolforge.

Educators know that Gates is bad for education

[Zero__Kelvin]

You are showing your ignorance quite strongly here Mr. 2736913. You clearly don't know the history at all, and the corruption is far too detailed and pervasive to cover in a Slashdot post. It is especially showing that you cannot even get the details of the one morsel of the behavior of which you have heard. The one thing you can be 100% certain of is that if Gates is involved, there is something in it for him. Here is one of the ways the effort should not be seen as philanthropic, from this blog ...

"However, just having the source code and standards for the technology won’t get you too far. The real work (and the real money) is in the process of making sure the system can connect to all the state’s various data sources, and is customized to meet the particular requirements of each state, a process known as integration. This part will not be done for free. On top of that, the deployment of the SLC system will generate consulting fees, training, ongoing customization, add-on features, and other needs known as professional services. Wireless Generation’s $8 million data-coaching contract with Delaware is just a small example."

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.

Re:Educators know that Gates is bad for education

[Rutulian]

Though I am sure you'll find some nonsense revisionist reason to blame MS for CDE sucking

Um, no. CDE sucked yes, and no it wasn't MS fault. But CDE wasn't ever competition for Windows. It ran on the old proprietary Unices on custom hardware and was never in the running to be a consumer OS running on off-the-shelf x86 hardware. OS/2 was, though, and it definitely didn't suck.

MS did have market forces working for it, but you totally ignore the missteps, bumbling and stumbling by the competition while MS executed well, across DOS, Windows, Office etc.

There was far more of the former than you are acknowledging. IBM did, in some ways, have its head up its ass by not recognizing the potential for the x86 market much earlier, but they were responsible for the BIOS that made DOS possible. OS/2 failed because it was never bundled by OEMs and had limited native software (Lotus vs. Office). The early history of MS is characterized almost entirely by inferior, buggy, software replacing technically superior software, either because MS was able to get sweet bundling deals with OEMs, or because they were able to undercut their competition in price. And because they also made a strong effort to be incompatible with everything else, there was no turning back after you switched to MS.

Take Netscape for example, it was good the first few versions and then later IE 4-5 was actually objectively better.

IE did some things better than Netscape and Netscape did some things better than IE. It mostly came down to preference which one you would choose. And this would have been fine except for the fact that IE started implementing HTML behaviors in ways that weren't documented anywhere (standards-based or otherwise). So web developers, then, had to choose which browser to develop for (completely contrary to the principles of the web), and then market share suddenly became important (cue problems with bundling). If IE vs. Netscape had only been about technical merits, let the best browser win, nobody would have cared. But much like the Office file formats, MS became the de facto standard that nobody could compete against because it was intentionally incompatible with everything.

For the latest example of such a thing, see Sony stumbling with the PS3, while the XBox overtook it in sales.

And for another example, see MS stumbling with HD-DVD, while BluRay won the HD battle. I would say the PS3 is not doing badly. The division is profitable and total units sold is not far behind Xbox360. Meanwhile, PS3 has not suffered from things like the "bricking" issue. While Sony may have stumbled by committing to the Cell processor, I think their biggest problem is lack of good developer tools. You can't really criticize the hardware. It really is fantastic.

Free Text Books

[unixisc]

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.

Re:What software ??

[TheRaven64]

1) whats the point in developing Open Source software for use in education if the framework/operating system on which it runs is not also open source.

The thing that Stallman and his followers usually miss the importance of: incremental deployment. If you replace all of your proprietary Windows applications with open source ones, then it's usually relatively easy to then replace Windows with a free operating system. Windows and Linux/*BSD/Whatever then all run all of the applications you want, but Windows is more expensive, so the choice is easy.

Re:Undermining?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Education providers are a bunch of leeches, providing sub-par products at prices that would make you cringe."

So Gates has significant experience to bring to the table.

Re:150k? Isn't that like a buck fifty to the guy?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"150k? Isn't that like a buck fifty to the guy? "

No. It is like breaking up a penny into very small parts and giving away one of the pieces.

Re:Gongrats to Gates and others

[Bogtha]

That is a piddly amount of money compared to what Gates made while stifling innovation through unfair business practices

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.

Microsoft vs. Microsoft

[Zero__Kelvin]

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."