Debian Edu + Skolelinux: 1 project, one distro, 2 names (Was: Debian Edu + Skolelinux: 2 names, 2 distros, 1 project)

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Holger Levsen]
> What do you think of the general idea? 

Personally, I fail to see how our target group, the schools that
currently use windows and are in need of a free software based
alternative, will benefit at all.

Working on two distributions will cost more effort and man-hours, and
we are short on both, and the schools I know of have not expressed
once that they want a distribution that fail to work with their
hardware and lack support for the tools they need to do their work.

The difference between your ideas for two separate distributions would
be that one would work with as much hardware as we can reasonable get
to work, and the other would not.  And for lenny, the only other
difference would be if etoys is installed by default or not.

To me it is simple.  The effort we spend should make sure to improve
the experience for schools and school adminstrators.  That means one
project, one distribution and two names.

The two-name issue is simply a result of merging two projects a few
years ago, and I believe there is no need to try to assign the two
names two different meanings.  They are simply the original names of
two projects that merged.  We keep both because, the skolelinux name
have strong branding in some groups (like Norway), while the Debian
Edu have stronger branding in other areas (like Debian).

I hope some time in the future we can provide a fully working solution
for schools using only free software, but until hardware vendors stop
shipping non-free firmware, we have a fully free flash implementation
on par with the Adobe version (or Adobe release its version as free
software) and we do not see the point of providing any non-free
applications, I believe we are doing schools most good by providing
_one_ good distributions for them to use and not waste testing and
development resources.

We need to ask ourself when we work if our effort make it easier for
schools to use free software and Skolelinux/Debian Edu, and if the
answer is no, we should probably reconsider what we are doing. :)

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen