[IAEP] [SLOBS] [SLOBs] F11+0.88+XO1.* as a SL project

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Fri, 25-06-2010 a las 13:23 -0400, Mel Chua escribió:

> 2. cjb and tomeu and mchua are wondering whether that infrastructure 
> access (which you *don't* need SL project status for!) was what the 
> project was asking for, or if there was anything more to the request to 
> become an "official project" - what resources, specifically, would they 
> want from SL that they think becoming a "SL project" will grant them? 
> Bernie, can you respond?

In addition to the hosting and bandwidth, I would like to ask for
permission to add a link to F11-0.88 to the wiki sidebar, below SoaS.

Cjb said that it was not an issue for OLPC, but Tomeu was still
concerned that other downstream projects could be negatively affected by
our endorsement of an XO distribution. What makes us look really biased
is having just SoaS in our Projects side-bar.

In fact, I exchanged a few emails with a F11-0.88 tester who refused to
file activity bugs on bugs.sugarlabs.org because "I'm not interested in
how Sugar runs on desktop machines (nor on Ubuntu, etc.)" :-(

This comment of an OLPCNews reader is even more eloquent:

  http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/the_best_xo_laptop_operating_s.html#comment-296246


We seem to have a problem of perception of SL being biased towards
specific vendors. To fix that, we could either choose to stop working
with anyone, or we could offer the same service level to any downstream
project asking for Sugar Labs hosting. Currently, our infrastructure is
also hosting these partners:

 * OLE - http://www.ole.org
 * OLE Nepal - http://olenepal.org/
 * Paraguay Educa (some services)
 * Karma - http://karma.sugarlabs.org
 * Somos Azucar - http://somosazucar.org
 * GCompris (only the git repository)
 * ZeroInstall (only a package repository)

I would personally *love* to give more visibility to all of these
through links in our wiki. Only Karma and GCompris would really qualify
as hosted Projects. The others are partnering organizations. OLE Nepal
should really be a Local Lab.

As far as I'm concerned, we could even extend the same invitation to
other Sugar related projects that are being hosted at disparate, obscure
locations: eXe, Trisquel Sugar, Ubuntu Sugar Remix...

Mel asked an interesting question: what exactly is a Project? Some time
ago, David Farning studied the issue and posted a criteria for endorsing
sub-projects modeled after the Eclipse and Apache models, two very large
and very successful umbrella projects.

In two years of Infrastructure Team coordination, I don't remember ever
refusing any hosting, syndication or account request. Why? Because I
believe that "Stop Energy" fundamentally hurts organizations like ours.
We've been quite successful at hosting activities because there's almost
zero stop energy in the way of contributors. The same could happen in
other areas as well.

Unlike a business, we don't need to focus their resources just on
revenue-making activities. Our fuel actually comes from contributors,
there's rarely anything to gain by telling them to go away.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/