Friday, October 19, 2007

TheOpenDisc and OpenEducationDisc

Interest in the OpenCD since Software Freedom Day and our local press reports has been both gratifying and stimulating. Comments received have been very rewarding.

Well, times do change and I believe the following change will be for the better of the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) community. The OpenCD project is no longer supported but a new project, TheOpenDisc, has been announced.

Chris Gray, project lead for the past eighteen months, is now in charge of TheOpenDisc - http://www.theopendisc.com/ -

Peter Kemp, formerly of OpenEducationCD, will be joining Chris on OpenEducationDisc - http://www.theopendisc.com/education/ - which is an extension geared to schools and students. Peter recently won the prestigious School Projects Award from the British educational charity, Teach First - http://www.teachfirst.org.uk/ - for his work with FLOSS.

The two main goals of the project are:

* To provide a free alternative to costly software, with equal or often better quality equivalents to proprietary, shareware or freeware software for Microsoft Windows.
* To educate users about Linux as an operating system for home, business and educational use.

The majority of programs featured on OpenDisc are also available on Linux. (Program list with versions is available at the wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDisc -)

Chris and Pete hope to release updated versions regularly so software will always be fresh.

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