[Techteam] Weekend Report - due today

[Greg Smith]

Hi Tomeu et al,

FYI this is a piece of my weekly report that I write for my manager and 
the engineers working for OLPC (aka techteam). Its sometimes picked up 
by the community news.  It just says "what I did last week" and "what my 
goals are for next week".  I hope to send it to this list too in the 
future.

Cmap tools (http://cmap.ihmc.us/) is a client server application that 
appears to have pretty good traction in schools, mostly in South 
America. We have a request to make it work on the XO. I exchanged some 
e-mails with Alberto Canas (con enye) who is the main application owner.

There are three main challenges to making this work on the XO:
1 - It runs on Java. (I asked about Java on a list for that reason, but 
I asked about Java in the browser. In this case its just Java VM).
2 - It uses multiple windows.
3 - Its free but not open source.

The first point seems solvable if they just install Java afterwards. 
Then we don't need to worry about licenses. Its a big install but 
probably not a deal breaker. The performance may be challenging but 
again I think we can make it fit.

The second point is a tougher problem. Alberto thinks they could 
re-write the application to work with tiled windows so they all fit on 
the XO. The other idea I have heard is that we could run an activity 
which is X-Windows. Then you could launch this activity within that one. 
That may affect performance and would need testing. For the first idea 
of rebuilding the Cmap tools for sugar, we would need engineers to work 
on that which brings me to the third point.

I'm not sure what free but not open source means. I think it means that 
we can not take a snapshot of their code and fork it nor can we modify 
it and push it back to them. We need to find a way for Alberto to hire 
more engineers if we want them to improve the implementation for the XO.

The only good idea so far is the X-windows in Sugar idea.

I'm open to other suggestions on this. Questions and comments welcome too.

I know of one opportunity in Latin America which is being held up by 
this. There may be more in the future, we'll see. The pedagogical 
specialists here tell me that concept maps are pretty hot in education 
right now. They also pointed me to a commercial tool which some schools 
use: http://www.inspirationsoftware.com/

Does anyone know of an open source solution in this area?

If the customers want cmap tools, my first choice is to make that work. 
That's what I'm focusing on right now albeit lower priority than 
shipping 8.2 :-).

Thanks,

Greg S

****************

Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:37:51 +0200 From: "Tomeu Vizoso" 
<tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> Subject: Re: [Techteam] Weekend Report - due 
today To: "OLPC Development" <devel at lists.laptop.org>, "Greg Smith" 
<greg at laptop.org> Message-ID: 
<242851610808310137h1b97102al2a6ca71bac235d50 at mail.gmail.com> 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 
8:52 PM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
 > >
 > > - Follow up on Cmap tools

Looks quite interesting, where can we get more details?

Regards,

Tomeu