[IAEP] A Fine Tradition...

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 07:40, Michael Stone<michael at laptop.org> wrote:
> Carrying on a fine tradition of July-based Sugar reflections [1, 2], I'm going
> to offer some mostly unsolicited advice. (Sorry, Tomeu, but you asked me to
> write. :^)
>
>   Dear Sugar Labs,
>
>   In the past year, you succeeded in removing two important barriers to entry
>   for new developers: you have created a distinctive brand and you freed Sugar
>   from the XO.
>
>   What's next? Here's a four-part RFC:

All sound pretty good to me, any concrete steps you can suggest?

Regards,

Tomeu

>   1. Could we embrace POSIX and the RESTful Web throughout our software [3]?
>
>     POSIX and HTTP are the mother tongues of our ecosystem and developer base.
>     By embracing them, we make our software much cheaper to explore and to
>     modify.
>
>   2. Could we live more within our packaging?
>
>     This way, our packaging gets tested more quickly, we become more
>     expert /at/ packaging, we make friends in our distros, we get better
>     packaging, and our releases become easier!
>
>   3. Could we make ourselves more interesting to be around, for example by
>   saying "maybe we could..." or "I have... (and you can too...!)" more
>   frequently than we say "I can't."?
>
>     Our strengths lie in our big, sexy, /powerful/ ideas. We can't shrink from
>     these ideas; they sparked our desire to contribute and they will do so for
>     others. (Otherwise, we will fade.)
>
>   4. We could do more to help one another to develop as may be necessary to
>   advance those big, sexy ideas.
>
>     (Anecdote: I don't think any of us here today started off understanding
>     much about communities, UI design, networking, release management, quality
>     assurance, or large-scale coding; I just see lots of people who looked for
>     people who were smarter and more knowledgable than they were and who worked
>     really hard to catch up. We should do more of that.)
>
>   xoxoxo,
>
>   Michael
>
>   P.S. - In the spirit of walking the walk, I'll also share one of my own
>   recent puny efforts in the direction outlined above:
>
>     http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network2
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
>
> [1]: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007304.html
> [2]: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007390.html
> [3]: (With suitable hacks under the covers of FUSE and DNS.)
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