Re: Release team
On 29 Jun, 2005, at 23:21, RalfGesellensetter wrote:
Am Sonntag, 26. Juni 2005 23:12 schrieb Vidar Bakke:
The board of Frisk approves the initiative. Any feedback is highly
appreciated.
At Karlsruhe, we were asked quite often about the roadmap of skolelinux
sarge. I used to announce a stable release by the end of this year (as
somebody told be -- but now I am not certain anymore who).
I will be very disappointed if the Sarge version is not ready before the
end of the year. Finn-Arne is committed to make it happen end of
August if any contributors shows up.
One goal of the release team is to be able to speed up
the PR process and get more people involved. More involvement is the key
to faster development. My goal is that we are able to release new stable
versions of Skolelinux on a regular basis. The statement "It's ready
when its ready" is not what makes school owners adopt Skolelinux. If
technology is the main driving force for spending time on Skolelinux I
understand the relaxed attitude. If the values of free software and
usage of ICT in schools are important I'll guess a more traditional view
on roadmaps and deliverables is necessary because most managers are
concerned about it. Deployment is the measure for success, not the joy
of coding. I tend to be driven by helping schools and understand why a
lot of schools owners are reluctant to adopt free software. We don't do
anything to relief their uncertainty, but to the contrary we are
confirming the uncertainty.
Statement like:
"We are very focused at serving our customers and to
deal with the uncertainty of moving to a new technology
we have taken the necessary measures. Even if most of our
customers claim that Skolelinux is superior technology
we recognize that a migration away from legacy
software is a challenge and we will do our best to
ease the transition and to maximize the financial
and teaching reward.
is better than:
"Hey stupid why are you supporting big greedy corporate
America when you could apt-get install koffice for free"
When you
mention: Until December 2005, do you mean: the time table is due to
then, or the final step described in the schedule should be finished by
then?
The deadline mentioned was for creation of a job description for the
release team with responsibilities and statutes (deadline 2005-12-01).
You put it as if the sarge prereleases were previews for skolelinux
sarge.
Yes, and please read Finn-Arnes to do list....
All that I was told was that there will never be such version -
as the new sarge based skolelinux will have a different structure
(kerberos, cerebrum etc.) while these pre releases are "only" sarge
adaptions of Venus. Is this a misunderstanding?
Yes. Even with Cerebrum the structure would not be all different.
I strongly believed in the Cerebrum concept, but it was
way to complicated to make it run and scale. Andreas S. did paid
work on it, but expect from the work done by him nothing was done.
Cerebrum was a good example on what happens when
you are throwing money after a problem that the market don't see
any value in. It's a waste.
Finally - maybe off topic - it was reported, that some schools in
Norway
were able to choose between ms windows and an additional teacher. Are
there more precise facts on this? (Where was this, how many pcs/pupils
per teacher etc.)
No. Only rumors. The numbers might be the source... I have no confirmed
case where Skolelinux was chosen because the school wanted to save a
teacher position or hire one additional. I might exist, but not to my
knowledge.
What is true is the fact that in the city of Oslo the average school
with 450 students and staff, and a PC coverage of 3 (meaning 3 humans
for every pc) the maintenance/operation cost for the solution provided
by the city (the name of the solution in InnsIKT) is Eur56K pr. year.
The cost with Skolelinux is Eur19K pr. year, or a saving of 2/3. A
number of people will claim that the InnsIKT solution (Windows based) is
much better and more sophisticated than Skolelinux I will claim that
Skolelinux is a 67% saving and good enough.
The last 2 years we have tried to convince the market that Skolelinux
has a lower operating costs than a Windows based solution.
Sure enough we have got a lot of attention, but the hard fact is that
99.9%
of the money spent is not used on Skolelinux, nor on other free software
solutions.
This is why we now are committed to tap directly into the revenue stream
by traditional selling. We must win RFP's and make people vote for free
software with their money, not only by their voice.
-vidar
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