[K12OSN] wild speculation on K12LTSP's future

[Eric Harrison]

First off, please note that is all "speculation". I've been pretty quiet
the last two weeks and I'll probably be offline most of next week (I've
had my arm twisted into attending a conference in Hawaii ;-). This is
more or less just a quick brain dump on what I've been working
on/thinking about.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been chatting with Jim McQuillan of
LTSP and Mark Shuttleworth and Matt Zimmerman of Ubuntu. We have
discussed a large number of topics, many of which concern K12LTSP and
the areas where it is best for us to focus our resources and expertise.

Yesterday, Jim and Matt flew out to Portland and the three of us spent
all day hacking on code, talking about how LTSP works, the
needs/concerns of distribution developers, etc, etc.

 From a technical stand-point, I believe we made great strides in
developing a game-plan to make it easier to integrate LTSP into a
distribution. The hopeful outcome of this would be (this is where the
speculation part comes in) that Matt will successfully integrate LTSP
into Ubuntu and the workload on Jim will be reduced significantly so
that he can focus on adding new features into LTSP.

What would this mean to K12LTSP? Worse case it will also reduce my
workload on integrating LTSP into K12LTSP so that it is easier for me to
focus on adding new features to K12LTSP. Best case, the unique features
of K12LTSP will be mainstream, fully supported by the major
distributions, and we can focus our resources and expertise completely
on education issues.


Which brings us to speculation on education. Mark Shuttleworth has been
doing a lot of work with schools around the world. You may remember a
recent post talking about how the Shuttleworth Foundation has installed
K12LTSP for 80,000+ children in South Africa. The Shuttleworth
Foundation is funding a number of projects aimed directly at education,
the Schooltool project for example: http://schooltool.org/. Since the
interest of the Shuttleworth Foundation/Ubuntu cross over into the areas
of interest of K12LTSP, I'm willing to speculate that we will be working
more and more with them in the future. I've already volunteered to help
with some of the packaging of the schooltool project...


-Eric




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