Bug#775456: ITP: sankore -- interactive whiteboard interface
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:22 AM, Mike Gabriel
<mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de> wrote:
> Then there was this openboard fork which became very promising... and
> vanished soon again, because the employee working on openboard changed his
> employer (and his working focus with that). Andrea Colangelo (warp10@d.o)
> did that part of the communication with the openboard upstream dev, but I am
> not sure if that went to mailing list or if it was just between several
> interested people in Cc:. Maybe Andrea can give a brief summary on the
> status.
The whole communication has been off-list among me and Claudio
Valerio, the guy behind the OpenBoard effort. It looked a really
promising project, then Claudio's company and the French government
had some disagreement and the work stopped. Even worse, Claudio can't
work anymore on that project, although the code is still available on
github. [1]
[1] https://github.com/OpenEducationFoundation/OpenBoard
Just in case something really bad happens, I forked the repo on my github too.
A big problem with Sankore is that those non-free fonts are used in
many parts of the interface, so some work to swap fonts and use free
ones is required. That is something that Claudio may (or may not) have
done in openboard, I haven't checked yet. The biggest problem,
nevertheless, is that upstream is totally unresponsive and not
interested in fixing the legal things, which is a showstopper as of
now. Patching sankore to use free fonts shouldn't be difficult, but
it's a quite big program and some effort might be required (also, I'm
not expert at all in C++, so digging the code to find the relevant
bits is not my cup of tea).
All that said, I strongly support any effort to bring sankore into
archives, that's a great piece of software and we really want it. In
my humble opinion, the best course of action is to check that the
latest version still has those issues (Mike did a great work reporting
detailed info on the other ITP [2]), and in case it still has, we
should try to get in touch with upstream again. Some time has passed,
so something might have changed. If, as I expect, upstream is still
not responsive, we might take the road of patching. Provided enough
eyeballs and fingers can work on it, that should be doable. The
packaging Mike and Miriam might not be perfect, but it's a great
start, surely enough to get at least a working .deb, so once we are
done with all the legal crap, the thing should be easy.
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=673322#70
--
Andrea Colangelo | http://andreacolangelo.com
Debian Developer <warp10@debian.org> | Ubuntu Developer <warp10@ubuntu.com>
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