Thursday, April 30, 2009

SchoolTool 1.0 Out NOW!

Who would have believed that I'd spend nearly five years of my life (and who knows how many more) being paid by a South African cosmonaut to develop free software for schools. Who would have dreamed not only that it would take this long to get to "SchoolTool 1.0" -- even more that Mark and I would stick with it? Over the years I've not only repeated all the standard mistakes in software project management, but created some new ones in trying to figure out how to get open source developers and K-12 schools to work together.

What's kept us going is the belief that if we could just get the software written, the demand would be huge -- not so much in mainline US school districts, but there are lots of schools in the world that would benefit from free, easy to use, reliable administrative software.

So now things will get interesting... and fun.

5 comments:

sylvia martinez said...

Congratulations!

Miles Berry said...

Outstanding work Tom!
Congratulations!

jelkner said...

It has already been a lot of fun, Tom, but I know we can count on even more fun in the next few years!

Bill Kerr said...

yep, congratulations of two babies in one month ... this must be a good year :-)

Perhaps it will be adopted in the developing world first (?), they get to play with the good stuff while we stagnate in the metropolis with clunky and expensive legacy systems

Tom Hoffman said...

Bill,

It seems like the route will be nibbling around the edges in the developed world where there's more capacity to experiment, and then jumping up to regional adoption in, say, one of the poorer parts of Europe or somewhere in Latin America where they are emphasizing moving public infrastructure to free software.