Free Software in education

On July 10 my trainees started a project on Sourceforge called bibliotheque.

The training is about web development (Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, SQL) and the whole six month day time courses, they use Debian GNU/Linux (guess why ;-)) (well, some installed Ubuntu on their laptop).

The last big exercice is often a pain because they are looking for a job and they have a lot of interviews. So we decided the last project to be team oriented.

I have the idea to publish it on Sourceforge so they can learn all how to use Bug tracker, Subversion tools the way we do in Free Software. Also, it's amazing to see the enthousiasme of the trainees about a project that is published. Even those who are not 'so good coders' did a lot of things like documentation, logos, maintaining the MediaWiki website (french).

The web application they are doing is made with tools they'll use in companies: Struts, Hibernate; they also use patterns like DAO, MVC; and they'll try to integrate AJAX in the application. Congratulation to this group.

Everybody wants to open source...

It's strange to follow state of minds of big companies about open source (they rarely speak about Free Software but that's another story;-)). Dalibor Topic, Mark Wielaard and all friends from GNU Classpath spent a lot of time talking with Sun to try to open source Java (or even just be able to get the tools to make open source java virtual machines and API). They are some moves in that direction and people like Tom Marble is working hard to make Sun's JDK license DFSG compatible and integrate Sun's JDK in the Debian distribution. Robert Brewin, co-CTO of Sun Microsystems' software group, said: "I believe that we will have components of Java released into open source within the year," meaning by next June, Brewin said. "I think [release of] the whole thing will take a little bit longer." One more step.

Another amazing interview is the one of David Kaefer, director of Business Development, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft who called the open source software movement a "very powerful force in the industry." He also wants us to believe that Microsoft will be more and more open... Wait and See ;-)