Behind Debian Edu and
-Skolelinux there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
-setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
-Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
-years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
-up in the recently released
-Debian
-Edu Squeeze version.
-
-
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
-
My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
-studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
-Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
-Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
-teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
-information technology and science/technology.
-
-
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?
-
-
Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
-project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
-qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
-contributing.
-
-
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
-out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
-Debian Project!
-
-
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
-downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
-setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
-possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
-long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
-because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
-rather small and often busy elsewhere.
-
-
The Debian LAN
-project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.
-
-
Which free software do you use daily?
-
-
I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
-on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
-mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
-have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.
-
-
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-
One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
-Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
-politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader". The school
-administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
-Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
-free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
-of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.
-
-
To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
-political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
-However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
-the system. There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
-"Free/Open Standards". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
-a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
-fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
-software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.
-
