The message 20050705134008.GA30379@tikka.gbdirect.co.uk from Mike Banahan mike.banahan@cutterproject.co.uk contains these words:

I'm asking to see if anyone can lend some technical assistance ... I don't think this will count as off-topic or the wrong kind of posting, but if it does, I apologise in advance.

Seems about right to me.

Cutter (http://cutterproject.co.uk) is unusual but loosely similar to some other projects in the Open Source world in that it's there to provide SUPPORT not software. We think that in markets such as schools, it's crucial to be able to purchase support for something close to an off-the-shelf or turnkey solution. Telling schools to roll their own and support themselves is not going to lead to large-scale adoption in a short timescale.

Seems reasonable...

We are having some initial success and generating a significant amount of publicity for what we are doing. There is something deeply satisfying about seeing classrooms full of youngsters using predominantly Free Software on their desktops. We think we have a good idea about what's needed by consumers in this area.

Yes, I've often wondered why IT doesn't seem to embrace anything but the Evil Empire, but having talked to some IT teachers, I am no longer surprised. Would you believe that when I gave one college IT lecturer the address of a newsgroup to look at, he asked: "Does that have www in front of it?"

Most of my teaching was done when a computer would occupy a whole floor, and act as a source of heating, to boot. (Sory for that - couldn't resist it.)

We are committed to publishing any original software that we write and adhering to the the GPL where we further develop packages like LTSP.

It would be great to have a large stream of revenue that allows us to take on full-time paid developers. We aren't that far down the road yet unfortunately. At the same time, there is a number of technical issues that we want to address and are appealing for help with. We can provide some very modest funding if necessary and would like to hear from developers with good development skills who would be interested to work with us on ironing out some of the knottier matters and liaising with other similar efforts.

I'm very much a Linux novice and have only done simple programming with VB, but I could certainly give you a good idea about any snags in getting ideas over to the tyros.

Amongst the items on the technical roadmap at present are:

• Setting up a managed Subversion repository
• Improving sound support on LTSP thin clients (a challenge)
• LDAP configuration of thin clients (Perl/MySQL/LDAP)
• LDAP configuration of users (Perl/MySQL/LDAP)
• Productising the 'grabber' classroom/terminal management tool (C++/Qt)

Er, yes. But I can always call on one of Zetnet's directors patiently to explain things - he's a Debian developer.

We have to produce highly reliable software, so releasing stuff at alpha level doesn't cut it.

Well, not unless you have some users who are into that sort of thing. (I test Zetnet's alphas and betas of ZIMACS, their mail/news-handling software.)

There is a 'project office' of sorts in Cottenham near Cambridge (UK), so it would seem to make sense to focus on people who are in the area to make it easier to hold occasional face-to-face meetings.

We'd be happy to hear from anyone who thinks they might enjoy working on a project that has a combination of Free and commercial imperatives intermixed.

I would, assuming I could contribute anything. I run Debian on one machine, and have Knoppix, which runs from CD. It'll be two machines soon, I expect.

Sorry this is so long!

I've left it there for a bit, but I thought I ought to get round to thinking about it before your post autoexpired or got buried way down the list.