Importance of developer gatherings DebianEdu / Skolelinux Free Software World Conference 3.0 Project manager Knut Yrvin 4th July 2007

Inter project cooperation Debian installer Linux Terminal Server Project Enterprise configuration New software tailored for teaching Reuse and maintainability Importance of upstream Do-o-cratic They who does the work decides 2

Skolelinux project as an example +400 schools using the system today

Before presenting inter project experiences, some important things about computers in schools

It's not about office productivity It's really about: Sending drawings to school classes in other countries. Making music, gather information or decode words (in lower grades). Learn to create and share It's not about office productivity

The basic idea Pupils interested in technical, under-the-hood things can learn by example – from source code written by expert programmers Using our own mother tounge when travelling on the information highway More computers and more software, less time with maintenance. Get more for less 6

Experiences with gatherings

Rewriting Debian Installer Initially: Number of choices to install DebianEdu was 128 Auto, auto, auto Choices was reduced to 3 Voluntary and sponsored development Choose profile, language and source

Workable installer at Debconf 3 Rewriting installer started autumn 2001 Workable installer summer 2003 Made it a Debian project, paid Joey Hess First released with Skolelinux 1.0 Then Debian Sarge

Translating Debian Installer Kurt Gramlich motivated developers to translate new Debian Installer to 13 languages at Debconf 3, summer of 2003. With Debian Etch we got 54 langages:

Skolelinux and Edubuntu Cooperation Developer gatherings Linux Terminal Server Project Educational software Integration issues, e.g laptop support, hardware recognition

Linux Server Terminal Project Prior versions of LTSP Distro dependent packages (RedHat) LTSP with kernel, xfree86 and init- scripts integrated as a “mini distro” Difficult to maintain and distribute LTSP 5.0 (MueKow project) Distro independent Debian, Fedora, SuSE Gentoo, Slackware LTSP with init-script. Reuse of distro spesiffic kernel, x.org etc. Easy to maintain and distribute Mark Shuttleworth asked for LTSP integration in Ubuntu

Skolelinux, LinEx, PSL-Brasil Joint statement, 29 July 2004 The intention is to eliminate the duplication of work and to facilitate communication of ideas between the participants. In this way we hope to improve the competence of our digital skills and to ensure universal access to technology for youth and adults. Initiated by Anne Østergaard, GNOME

DebianEdu / Extremadura 2006 Fixing autopartitioning Cleaning debian- edu-install/config Suggest to include LinEx upstream Maintenance and sustainability

Importance of upstream Upstram project translating StopMotion Gatherings Different developers Rosetta (Canonical)

Developer gatherings Using the free software development methods and tools - upstram It will introduce more work and hinder adoption when not contributing upstream Finance and facilitation of developer gatherings Speeds up the developing effort and reduces frictions between groups You could get on or two free loaders out of 30 developers. That's much less than a regular company Spreading knowledge and experiences Don't reinvent what others has done. Reuse what others has done together That's more cost efficient and more fun

Have to obey All code, translations and documentation has to be committed to repositories upstream Bugs has to be committed to the bug-tracking system Follow the licence-terms. GPL your contribution if possible. And please don't complicate your project introducing complicated licenses schemas The person who does something decides Help people to help them selves by applying for economical support, paying for developer gatherings and infrastructure (version system, servers, trips etc.) Do-ocracy 17

Characteristics of DebianEdu / Skolelinux Started as an voluntary effort 2. July 2001 Contribution is over 100.000 man-hours from +200 developers, translators and writers since 2001 35 developer gatherings with 7 to 150 participants Most of them in Norway Norway, Germany, Greece, France, Spain and Brazil The version system “is the project” 18

New project Making it easy to use free software in teaching at universities and colleges Developer tools out of the box Project planning (KPlato) Unified Modelling Language (Umbrello) Workbench (Qdevlop, Kdeveloper, ...) Qtopia Greenphone SDK Mobile Developer Days 2007 University of Aalborg in June

Questions and Answers Thanks :)

Faster, Better, and Cheaper Free/Open Source Software Development (F/OSSD) often entails shorter development times that can produce higher quality systems, and incur lower costs than may be realized through developing systems according Software Engineering (SE) techniques. [...] Internet time and F/OSSD projects also tend to produce incremental software releases at a much faster rate, even to the point of releasing unstable but operational daily system builds. This denotes not only a reduction in product release cycle times compared to SE practice, but also a significantly restructured life cycle process and process cycle time reduction. Walt Scacchi from Institute for Software Research University of California, Irvine http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Papers/New/Scacchi-BookChapter.pdf

What is Skolelinux A complete ICT-solution for the schools network architecture out of the box, operational concept reuse of computers with thin clients and diskless workstations digital user profile 75 user programs, OpenOffice.org +50 languages Support our mother tongue with the schools curriculum in mind Made for the school budget