blog/draft/2012-03-skolelinux-andreas-mundth.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Andreas B. Mundt
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-03-15 11:30
   4
   5 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   6
   7 Andreas  Mundt
   8
   9 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  10
  11 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
  12 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
  13 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
  14 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
  15 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
  16 information technology and science/technology.</p>
  17
  18 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  19 project?</strong></p>
  20
  21 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
  22 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
  23 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
  24 contributing.</p>
  25
  26 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  27 Edu?</strong></p>
  28
  29 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
  30 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
  31 Debian Project!</p>
  32
  33 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  34 Edu?</strong></p>
  35
  36 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
  37 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
  38 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
  39 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
  40 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
  41 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
  42 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
  43
  44 <p>The Debian LAN project might fill the use case of a more flexible
  45 system.</p>
  46
  47 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  48
  49 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
  50 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
  51 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
  52 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
  53
  54 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  55 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  56
  57 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
  58 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
  59 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
  60 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
  61 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
  62 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
  63 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
  64
  65 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
  66 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
  67 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
  68 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
  69 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
  70 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
  71 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
  72 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>