[IAEP] [Marketing] The End of Sugar (thought exercise)

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Sam

On Jun 22, 2016 9:45 PM, "Samuel Greenfeld" <samuel at greenfeld.org> wrote:
>
> Historically there have been several organizations financially supporting Sugar development.
>
> But at least some of those have left, others have reduced their contributions, and it is unclear to me if any new groups have made significant tangible investments in the project.

Right. I'm pretty sure the only financial support this year is from
olpc inc in the form of James Cameron's time, and google in gsoc/gci
stipend donations. Again, I think the Trip Advisor capital was a
one-time donation and it must be spent in a way that creates surplus
value, increasing the financial resources of the project, rather than
spent in ways that decrease it.

> The XO laptop and icon, both commonly associated with Sugar, are OLPC trademarks.  There is nothing stopping anyone from licensing these and putting applications in the Android/Apple/Chromebook stores claiming to be "Based on Sugar" with a new "Journal" interface.

I expect no one is interested in those trademarks, given One Education
isn't using them today and was interested in them in the past. I
speculate either olpc inc isn't licensing them at all, or their price
is prohibitive; and I suspect the former is more likely.

However, I also think that anyone can make a journalling launcher and
reimplement other good ideas from sugar, and similar to Walter's
reply, I would be very happy to see sugars ideas reimplemented - as
that would validate they are indeed as good an idea as we assume they
are.

> In short: Sugar is having trouble expanding beyond its current territory, or at least publicly appears to be.

Rather, I would say that Sugar has lost most of its territory - ALSO
download metrics show Sugar usage has fallen by 90% over 3 years.

> So this week I thought of a couple of questions:
> What would cause you and/or your school(s) to stop using Sugar?

It appears to me that the number of people subscribed to this list who
regularly engage a school deployment can be counted on one hand - eg I
believe that Tony and Adam are - but the number people who can speak
for "their school" as in their employer is zero. I'll be very happy to
hear I am mistaken about this, though! :)

I offer the following speculative user stories for existing
institutional users of Sugar Desktop to quit:

1. "I'm not dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop, but I can not continue to
use it because the school district or other higher state power has now
mandated that I use certain software but Sugar Desktop can't run it -
either web based, such as Google Classroom or Blackboard, or desktop
based for the Windows or Android platforms. (While we have Sugarizer
that they could use alongside such software, Lionel said last month
that as far as he knows no schools use it.)";

2. "I'm not dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop, but I can not continue to
use it because I'm not aware of any contemporary cheap rugged laptops
that I can buy with Sugar pre-installed and a support contract, and
I'm not able to organize installing it on commodity hardware and
supporting it myself";

3. "I'm dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop because I want it to never
crash (I know of 5 reproducible crashes that went unfixed for more
than 12 months, and we hate it because we lose our work)";

4. "I'm dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop because I want better existing
features (I know of 5 obvious big problems that went unaddressed for
more than 12 months, and we hate it because we know software should
get better over time)";

5. I'm dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop because I want different/new
features (I know of 5 obvious new activities that no one has started
creating, and we hate it because we want to do new things);


> What would another project have to offer in order for it to be used instead?

As I wrote above, the most obvious allure of other projects is that
they are not "total" platforms, but integrate with other software -
likely proprietary - that the school has already licensed. I heard
from Sridhar who was CTO of OLPC-AU that he had debates with schools
that computers should even be available to young kids in classrooms,
and that today the situation has totally changed and now schools not
only agree that they should be available, but now expect to continue
using software that they are using and will not give up on.

> When would it be a good idea to move everyone to a new project?

I think that Sugar Desktop will have 100,000+ users on XO-1s until
2020 (representing 10%+ of the number of laptops sold) and so it makes
sense to continue the project until then.

If in the next 4 years there is no increase in the number of daily
downloads from ASLO (or a similar daily active use metric) then I
think 2020 when the XO-1s become unmaintainable will be a good date to
shut everything down.

I hope that in the next 4 years, Sugar Labs can push those metrics
back up to where they were 3 years ago, and can succeeded at working
with existing institutional users to transition to new non-XO hardware
as the XOs die off; and that, during those 4 years, every inch of
Python code will be ported to JavaScript so that Sugar becomes "a web
app," but one that is packaged for totally offline usage on XOs,
Chromebooks, Android devices, iOS devices, as well as Windows, OSX and
libre desktops.

> Under what circumstances should Sugar Labs be shutdown?

I think that the only circumstances that Sugar Labs should be shut
down is when no one is interested in maintaining any Sugar software,
and no one is interested in signing a contract with Conservancy (or
another umbrella org) to continue it, holds its trademarks, raise
funds for it, etc.

> If we can answer these questions, maybe we can reform Sugar to better meet these competitive challenges.

I think Sugar Desktop's reformation to meet these challenges has been
underway for some time in the form of Sugarizer. Three cheers for
Lionel! :)

However, Lionel told me that, as far as he knows, there are no schools
using Sugarizer.

Does anyone know of any?

Cheers
Dave