“April 15, 2002–One of the regularly recurring discussions in
any technology in education discussion forum surfaced again on the
schoolforge-discuss mailing list recently: the need for better
gradebook software. Three years ago there was a noticeable lack of
such software for Linux and other open source operating systems,
but now there are a number of options. However, for one reason or
another none of them seem to be getting much use. It seems that
gradebook programs are easy to write, but unless they can transfer
information into/out of other administrative software programs (for
attendance, discipline, scheduling, etc.) they’re not very useful.
The discussion went back and forth for a while on what features a
useful gradebook program would have. Eventually, Mike Eschman of
Engima Technology said:“‘If any person(s) on this list would publish a gradebook spec,
we would write to it for linux, and make it available for free
download to this mailing list.“‘Delivery on or before june 30th, 2002.
“‘I have five excellent programmers to put behind this
pledge.“‘Anyone game…?'”