[IAEP] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 05:12:46PM -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
> > So my vision is that this SoaS is actually *the* way of
> > distributing Sugar, as a SL product. If Sugar Labs doesn't think
> > so, I'd have preferred to be informed much earlier.
>
> I don't think you're likely to find much support for that vision as
> phrased.

De jure (or de populum), perhaps, but not de facto.  Witness the
marketing effort around SoaS (thanks Sean et. al.).  Witness the
non-wiki sugarlabs.org saying that to "try sugar" use "our ... Sugar
on a Stick".

David and the vision page on the wiki say:

"The mission of Sugar Labs® is to produce, _distribute_ [emphasis
mine], and support the use of the Sugar learning platform"

...which while "distribute" may of course mean Sucrose/Fructose rather
than Starch, SLOBs has left this intentionally ambiguous on this and
has put much effort into marketing SoaS.

In Walter's 2009-03-17 email, he mentioned this under the heading of
"What are our short- and long-term (measurable) goals?"

"Sugar on a Stick v1.0, will be launched in 2009 as well."
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-03-17

Hopefully this email thread can settle these questions officially,
once and for all:

1) Is SugarLabs going to _itself_ distribute a Linux distribution?

2) If so, is it to be based on Sebastien's Sugar-on-a-Stick work at
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/soas/repos/mainline ?

If these questions are not finally answered, SL is doing Sebastien a
disservice, in my mind.  They're simple questions and have simple
answers (though far-reaching consequences), so only the will is
lacking, it seems.

> SoaS is a great way to distribute Sugar, but it will certainly never be
> "*the* way", as long as all these other people are around, working hard on
> other distribution mechanisms.

I interpreted Sebastien's statement as something like:

"[My vision is that] Sugar-on-a-Stick is the the way that SugarLabs
distributes Sugar directly to "Learners".  Many other ways exist using
the big Linux distributions and the extraordinary efforts of many
people.  But SoaS is how SugarLabs does it directly."

I don't speak for him, though, or pretend to know his thinking on this
subject.

Martin



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