[IAEP] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Sebastian Dziallas]

Martin Dengler wrote:
> 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.

I would really love to see those questions answered, finally.

>> 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."

And that's exactly how it was meant. Thanks, Martin! :)

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

--Sebastian