Gates and Others Offer $150k For Open Source School Software 151
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."
Re:Gongrats to Gates and others (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
You say this - but I have the following issues with this
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.
2) taxpayers money - open source seems like a great way to save money and avoid costly licence / subscriptions - but if
apps are tied to a Windows licence - thats hardly the optimal situation
3) what apps are required to devlop the software and are they free and open source or will they be tied to closed source API's that will tie them to a specific platform?
4) Is it appropriate for a charity to tie students or schools into a specific environment that could benefit a non-charity organisation in the future , kind of like a drug dealer where the first hit is free but once you are hooked you are stuck in an endless, expensive cycle thats hard to break ?
N...
What a clusterfuck of documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slcedu.org] 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:Undermining? (Score:2, Insightful)
Free Text Books (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What software ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:150k? Isn't that like a buck fifty to the guy? (Score:4, Insightful)
No. It is like breaking up a penny into very small parts and giving away one of the pieces.