[Its.an.education.project] Sugar talk at PyCon Due

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 1:09 AM, Richard M Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:
>     The big story in the tech community, widely quoted, is Slashdot |
>     Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists
>
>  What nonsense!  The idea of an "open-source fundamentalist"
>  is as absurd as a "crusading Democrat".  The whole point of
>  open source was to avoid talking about ethics.
>
>
>     http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/28/1529201&from=rss
>
>     It presents the two sides, although there are many more Linux
>     advocates there than Microsoft advocates.
>
>  The system used on the XO is GNU, with Linux as the kernel.
>  Anyone calling it "Linux" is ignorant or worse.
>  See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html.

I understand your concern, and I agree that a kernel is not an OS, but
in fact the XO runs
Sugar/Python/Etoys/Gnome/etc./X/OpenFirmWare/GNU/Linux. Linux for
short, without prejudice to the contributions of all others in the
community. I'm not ignorant, so what is this "worse" that I gather you
mean to apply to me?

>  That URL is the URL of the slashdot article, and usually
>  those comment on an article that appeared elsewhere.
>  In the past, when I tried try to fetch the slashdot URL with wget,
>  I got only the comments, not the article.
>
>  Could you be so kind as to tell me the URL of the article itself?
>  (If you email me the text, that will speed things; otherwise
>  I will send mail to a demon that will fetch it, but that will
>  cause a half-day delay.)

Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists
Journal written by fyoder (857358) and posted by CmdrTaco on 2008-04-28 9:15
from the fundies-have-more-fun dept.
Operating Systems Education Linux
fyoder writes "Within the world of One Laptop per Child, both the
Negropontistas and the Benderites envision a future for Sugar where it
runs on multiple platforms, but the latter _don't want Windows_
[http://backofthebook.ca/technology/2008/04/negroponte-vs-open-source.html]
(or closed source anything) as part of that future. OLPC's emphasis
has always seemed to me to be on Sugar, with Linux simply being a
smart technical choice for the underlying OS. Yet what is becoming
more explicit with the resignation of Walter Bender is that for many
involved in the project there was a strong element of Linux advocacy,
such that Negroponte's flirtation with Microsoft is felt to be pure
sacrilege."

http://backofthebook.ca/technology/2008/04/negroponte-vs-open-source.html
Backofthebook.ca
Canada's Online Magazine
Eric Pettifor
Saturday, April 26, 2008

    Negroponte vs. the Open-Source Fundamentalists

    Rumblings of discontent within the One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
project erupted to the surface last week with the resignation of chief
software architect, Walter Bender. A split has formed between those,
like Bender, who see the project as primarily educational, and OLPC
leader Nicholas Negroponte, who wants to push as many laptops into the
hands of as many children as possible, even if it means getting into
bed with Microsoft. Or so it's been characterized.

    But having looked at both sides, I think what it essentially boils
down to is that geeks really, really don't like Microsoft. There would
be trouble within the organization if Negroponte merely batted his
eyelashes towards Redmond, never mind actively blessing Microsoft's
development of a version of XP that will run on the XO. Sure,
Microsoft is the devil, and of course it doesn't want a generation of
kids in the developing world exposed to Linux. But when did promoting
Linux become one of the OLPC's goals?

    Negroponte isn't abandoning his commitment to OLPC's software
platform, Sugar. As he wrote on the OLPC Community News listserv:

        Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms and
to run under Windows. We have been engaged in discussions with
Microsoft for several months, to explore a dual boot version of the
XO. Some of you have seen what Microsoft developed on their own for
the XO. It works well and now needs Sugar on top of it (so to speak).

    Meanwhile, Walter Bender may have resigned from OLPC, but Sugar is
released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows
anyone to do whatever they like with it, provided credit is given
where due. That's exactly what he intends to do, and not even
necessarily on the XO:

        Over time there are lots of things that will happen with Sugar
in terms of efficiency and platform independence. Already, the
community has by and large ported Sugar to Ubuntu [a form of Linux].
You can do an "apt-get Sugar" and if you've put the right repositories
in place, you can install Sugar on Ubuntu. There is also a live CD
that some folks in Austria put together, so you can run Sugar from
your CD drive. There's a lot of discussion on the developer forums
about how to make all of that happen more efficiently.

        The flip side -- it's been attributed to Steve Jobs, though I
never heard him say it -- is that if you really care about software
you have to work on hardware. Certainly there are a lot of hooks from
Sugar into the OLPC hardware, because the hardware itself is pretty
special. But while I think that the things that OLPC has done with the
hardware are necessary for successful deployment, I think that there
are compromises that can be made with other hardware in the short
term. So [you could get Sugar running on] other laptops and even other
computers.

            Walter Bender in Xconomy

    So, to summarize, one side holds the position that Sugar should be
able to run on other platforms, whereas the other side asserts that
Sugar should be able to run on other platforms. Not much of a split,
it would seem, except that you can google your way through everything
said and written by Bender and I doubt you'll ever find him advocating
Windows as one of the platforms on which Sugar should run. In fact, as
he also wrote in Xconomy:

        I think the culture around free software is actually a
powerful culture for learning, and one of my goals from the very
beginning of the project was to try to instill in the education
industry some of the culture and technology and morals of the open
source movement. I think it would greatly enhance the learning and
education industry and their ability to engage teachers and students.
So many different things are tied up in this concept. It's both about
freedom, and the freedom to be critical. Criticism of ideas is a
powerful force in learning, and unleashing that is, I think, an
important part of the OLPC mission.

    So there you have it. It's not about the XO, and it's not about
Sugar -- both sides are committed to both those manifestations of the
OLPC project. But even if you could get Sugar to run as an application
suite on Windows, with its own program manager and activities journal,
there are those in the OLPC project, and others who felt so strongly
about these matters that they had to leave, who would still be
opposed. These are the ones who believe that open source software in
general is critical to the mission of education, and that closed
source software, especially that of a convicted monopolist corporation
like Microsoft, is not only undesirable, but detrimental to that
mission.

    So when Negroponte characterizes his opponents as "open-source
fundamentalists," he's not entirely wrong. A less inflammatory term
would be preferable, though -- say, "people uncompromisingly committed
to the empowerment of educators and students through the freedom which
open-source software provides." That's a bit more of a mouthful, but
it does sound much nicer, doesn't it?

(Comments omitted)
-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay