GOALS:

Our goals are two-fold:

1) Promote and Produce Quality Free-Software or Open-Source Educational Software

We believe very strongly that quality educational software should be available for any child who wants it. To that end, we insist that our Tux4Kids or Friends of Tux4Kids projects must be either Free-Software or Open-Source. While we naturally prefer Free-Software (because of the freedoms granted by the strict "copyleft" licenses), we are not against other projects distributed under OSI Certified licenses.

Tux4Kids presently maintains and funds several educational projects. Part of this first goal is to continue to produce quality educational software. We want to eventually have a suite of high quality educational applications available to schools, parents, and (most importantly) children.

2) Promote and Produce Full-Featured Alternative Software Solutions to Proprietary Software

One of the biggest problems facing school districts today is proprietary software licenses.

Schools need technology in their classrooms. Parents want their children to be exposed to technology. Unfortunately, technology is costly and difficult to properly setup and utilize. Because of the expense, school districts typically cannot purchase sufficient proprietary software licenses to completely cover their needs. Combine this with the fact that such software licenses are complicated and difficult to understand, and you get a situation where the dangers of copyright violation and legal troubles rise.

Some proprietary companies do actively pursue litigation against school districts which they feel have violated their software copyrights. A recent article at Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/10/ microsoft_school/index.html) highlights the financial and legal troubles that two such entities (Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance) have caused for numerous financially-strapped school districts.

We would like to ultimately have a family of complete Free and Open-Source software solutions to fill the needs of schools, and allow them to remove the dangers proprietary software can cause them.

Copyright © 2001-2004 Tux4Kids.
Comments to email address: sam at samhart dot net.