[IAEP] Really cool developments with SoaS v3

[Daniel Drake]

There have been some nice little changes in various parts of SugarLabs
recently which make me happy to see that core contributors are really
thinking about sugar sustainability and sugar in the field, but I
think we've all just been blown out of the water with 4 really great
things about the new SoaS release that I'd like to highlight:

1. Scaling to appropriate resources - given that the community isn't
that big, they've cut back to something that's maintainable and
sustainable, with clear processes, and ideas on how to grow as more
resources become available.

2. Piggybacking from other communities - by making sure that
everything is sparkly clean and by positioning themselves within the
bounds of Fedora's organization, rules and guidelines, they've won
support and assistance of Fedora and its community, to the point where
SoaS is a download from Fedora itself, and is prominently featured in
the Fedora 13 release notes (extremely cool!):
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F13_one_page_release_notes?F13an

3. Local requirements - I see a change in model with the v3 release,
from a model that I never thought would work well (1 version of SoaS
for the whole world) to the simple distribution of a reference
platform with a clean process for making customizations, which is
realistically something that the vast majority of significant soas
deployers would want to do.

4. Build/customization documentation - in addition to actually
adjusting the process to make customization clean and possible,
they've written *good documentation* on how to do it, even ready for
the release date and not done as an afterthought:
http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/docs/customization-guide/


Thanks to the SoaS contributors, great work!
Daniel