[IAEP] A greater cause (Re: etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository)

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hello,

  Sorry for causing some email traffic last a few days.

  We, everybody who are participating the project, including Albert,
John, Bert and myself, are working for a greater cause; that is to
empower children all over the world via computer technology and
education.  There are some difference of opinions, but let us not lose
the sight of the bigger goal.

  Etoys is already installed millions of computers, and children all
over the world have been using it several years.  If we get Etoys to
the hands of more children, more children can exchange projects, share
ideas, work together, and unite.  It doesn't matter whether the
computer they use is XO or not because Etoys happens to run
everywhere.  And, on XO, I heard from people at deployments/pilots
often that Etoys is one of the most important activity.  So, I think
that trying to get Etoys into major Linux distributions serves for the
greater cause.

  Of course, even if Etoys gets in a Linux distribution, not every
user/developer has to work on Etoys nor everybody has to understand
how it is implemented.  For those, it is just several unfamiliar files
on their disk and there is absolutely no harm.

  On the other hand, we would like to get more people to help Etoys
development And I can assure you that you can go deeper than any other
systems once you dive in.  Please join us!  Even if your only computer
is XO, you can participate as good as the core developers.  (If you
are good, you can join/take over the core team, in fact.)

  Also, please think about making a similar/better system in any other
languages.  Alan Kay gave a keynote speach at Euro Python a few years
ago and urged the community to think about it.  It seems that a few
project got started but it takes years to be somewhat usable.

  Finally, thank you for everybody who have been involved in the
actual process of getting Etoys accepted to these distributions!

-- Yoshiki

  In a sense, Albert, John, Frank and others are kindly playing the
devil's adovocate role so that we can write stuff that we usually
don't.  Thank you guys, too^^;