[IAEP] FSF attitude to xo and sugar

Bill Kerr billkerr at gmail.com
Fri Aug 28 05:33:03 EDT 2009


n Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 7:20 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>wrote:

> === Sugar Digest ===

4. The recent FSF campaign condemning the use of Windows 7 in
education (See http://windows7sins.org/) imputes OLPC in complicity
with Microsoft. It is disappointing that the FSF is not making any
constructive arguments in favor of free software alternatives to
Windows such as Sugar on GNU/Linux, which is currently shipped on
every machine distributed by OLPC.

http://windows7sins.org/#1
When I first saw it I interpreted that page as contrasting the xo as a
positive alternative to Windows (and still think that is a valid
interpretation)

When I read what walter wrote above later I was shocked to realise that it
could indeed be interpreted the way walter has, as well

On revisiting I can't see any clarifying text there

If walter's interpretation is the correct one, which may well be true, then
it's a bad choice of graphic - they should have shown windows running on the
xo screen,  not happy smiling children

from this 2008 article RMS is supportive of sugar but ambivalent about the
xo:

Sugar is free software, and contributing to it is a good thing to do. But
don't forget the goal: helpful contributions are those that make Sugar
better on free operating systems. Porting to Windows is permitted by the
license, but it isn't a good thing to do

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/can-we-rescue-olpc-from-windows
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