[IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 7:31 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> Stepping back for a moment, the key question is: how can we get Sugar
> out of the window manager and network manager and activity update and
> UI toolkit business, where it's just not keeping up (and wasting our
> efforts), and concentrate on the stuff we're all really here for:
> enabling kids to learn and explore and share?  How much can we strip
> away and still have Sugar?

If you want to abstract away, get far away from the computer and the
OS and target HTML5. You'll have some significant limitations, but
that's the tradeoff.

The thing is... if you want to be "closer to the metal", you're gonna
grind against it; and IMHO the best path looks a lot like what we have
in Fedora+Sugar. We pay a big price for it, but it takes us to the
highlands in Peru and many deep deep jungles, without and XS and
without internet.

Forget about kids in those places ("they'll get broadband-quality
internet... eventually") and yeah, we can do it all with JS and your
favourite language on the server side.

I look back at when OLPC started, and some things have changed in the
world _we_ live in. But the kids we want to help with... their world
hasn't changed much. They still haven't got internet for starters.
Some things might be a tad closer -- lower costs per laptop, tablets
are possible -- but connectivity isn't any easier or any cheaper.

cheers,


m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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