Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC digital curriculum service in England

[Kevin Donnelly]

On Wednesday 13 October 2004 11:34 am, Alex Hudson wrote:
> Ok, this is an initial try:
> http://www.affs.org.uk/~alex/HowDoWeReplaceFlash
> I would love to see our grants being able to target this area.

Great summary - thanks.  I don't particularly like Flash, but it is widely 
used, and those who use it are not going to switch to something that requires 
them to install several bits and then try to tie the output together (it 
would in fact be easier to persuade them to use the Flash authoring tools 
through WINE, but then Flash MX isn't yet supported on that.).  So from the 
point of view of the original query about curriculum resources, it seems to 
me that there is no real alternative that we can put forward from the free 
software field - indeed, it is revealing that several of the projects listed 
are a bit long in the tooth as regards releases.

> A practical approach might be to try and bump up the feature set of the
> free Flash players. This still leaves us the problem of a) codecs (but
> we can suggest, for example, Vorbis instead of mp3 and not get laughed
> at) and b) content creation tools. But, baby steps.

It's difficult to know where to start with this - by definition, we can't just 
utter a fiat, and have it happen.  Yet this is plainly a big gap in the 
desktop at the minute (the most obvious in an area, multimedia, where 
integrated free solutions are still thin on the ground).  

If there is agreement that it is worth doing, is it feasible to start a 
"campaign" or "program" to try and get developers interested in a project to 
develop something like this?  How much money could be assigned, either as 
donations or formal grants?  What would the specifications be?  Is there any 
real chance of getting anything useable within a reasonable timeframe?  Do we 
try to integrate the existing bits like SVG and SMIL, or start from scratch?

You're right about baby steps - the first one seems to me to be a bit of 
digging to find out if enough people see this as a problem and want to do 
something about it.

-- 

Pob hwyl (Best wishes)

Kevin Donnelly

www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rhydd yn Gymraeg
www.cymrux.org.uk - Linux Cymraeg ar un CD!