[IAEP] FOSSDEM update

[David Farning]

Last weekend we had a group of Sugar people attend FOSSDEM.  The focus
for the weekend was Mandriva and its derivatives.  Mandriva is a
natural fit for Sugar Labs because of their success in the netbook
market segment.  Our people talked to Mandriva, Gduim and Caixa
Magica.

One of the key points Tomeu came home with was not to suggest pushing
sugar to vendors as a replacement for their existing desktop choices.

 "I'm not sure what was discussed previously with him, but I don't
think that we should press (actually, even suggest to) our prospective
partners that already have a product to drop any of their work to
adopt Sugar in whole or in part. That creates resistance and makes
communication more difficult."

In my very limited experience I agree strongly with Tomue.  We don't
want to talk about replacing existing products.  Instead, we want to
focus on being an option that is available everywhere.  If we can
increase the Sugar value in the education technology ecosystem,
customers and vendors will ask for Sugar.

"Which are the cooperation points that I think we should seek with this
kind of partners:

1. sharing of experiences: which are the stronger and weaker points of
our solutions, which errors we made in the past and how we improved,
which are the next challenges, etc

2. use Sugar as an additional component of their educative software.  The
user could choose at startup to launch Sugar instead of the other desktop.

3. in deployments where _they_ feel it's needed to streak a deal, ship
only Sugar.

I don't think we should ever suggest 3 ourselves. Proposals I think we
shouldn't initially push for:

1. have them substitute their desktop product and offer Sugar instead.

2. modify their product to include elements of Sugar or the other way around."

Again I agree strongly with Tomeu.  Sugar Labs role when dealing with
partners is to provide them with added value to their existing product
line.  Redhat has a very good business model with their 'zero cost to
exit' strategy.

A final point was the importance of clearly delineating Sugar, the
collaboratively developed learning platform,  with OLPC, the hardware
product.

david