[IAEP] Building a business of Sugar/Jabber

[Sean DALY]

Greetings Russell,

The Sugar Labs Marketing Team has developed some marketing materials
you can use and adapt (posters, visuals).

We are very interested in starting an ecosystem for Sugar deployers,
at the front line supplying support to schools. We are not sure yet
ourselves what model(s) would work best, but with Sugar improving all
the time, and the Sugar community growing, we are confident in Sugar's
prospects in schools and on OLPC machines.

Feel free to mail me or the Marketing list with questions. Although
I'll be mostly unavailable until the end of August (moving house +
vacation), i'll try to help if I can
thanks

Sean




On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Russell
Brown<misterruss at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> Please accept my apologies if this is the wrong list for this, and
> please be kind enough to direct me to the correct one if you have the
> time.
>
> I've been aware of OLPC for some time. It is only with the recent
> Sugar On A Stick release that I have actually tried the Sugar platform
> for myself. On its own it is brilliant, but with a Jabber server for
> collaboration thrown in it is truly astounding. I often lament the use
> of Windows and Office (!!!, can you believe it?) at schools. My son is
> in primary school and he hates their ICT classes too. And when I hear
> how much my local authority just spent on providing Vista and Office
> to all High School children...
>
> I have been thinking of starting a computer club at my son's school
> for some time and now, with Sugar On A Stick the barrier to entry is
> suddenly miniscule. They Already have a bunch of PCs on a network...
>
> I have some Sugar instances and a patched Ejabberd server running in
> VMs and the collab is awesome. I also have an Asus eeepc running SOAS
> my kids love playing "memorze" against each other. And having robot
> chat blows them away.
>
> So...I can see that what you have is the most amazing platform and
> with the Ejabberd platform it is streets ahead of the alternatives...
>
> My question is: am I allowed to make money from this? I have a few
> ideas including
>
> 1) Computer course for kids in summer holidays...this would just be a
> day or two, but I would want to charge
> 2) Sell school server and SOAS devices to schools/clubs/whoever
>
> The 2nd is way ahead of what I can do right now, but the 1st is well
> within reach I think for the next holidays.
>
> If I learn anything that can be used by the community I will gladly
> contribute back. And if I make any money I will donate a portion of it
> to the sugar program. I can see that collab is not perfect, for
> instance, even on my local network it can take a while for a new
> joiner to show up, and people sometimes vanish straight away, so there
> must be stuff that I can do to help.
>
>
> Sorry for the rather unfocussed and gushy introduction, the summary
> is: wow what a platform, may I try and run a business using it?
>
> Thanks
>
> Russell
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