[Marketing] Nicholas Negroponte quote: Sugar as OS was 'mistake'

[Sean DALY]

I'm afraid Professor Negroponte has confused Sugar the desktop with
OLPC-OS... and journalists are confused too, because most of them have
never seen Sugar, nor a GNU/Linux desktop for that matter.

Most journalists find it difficult to avoid reporting what seems to be
a mea culpa. It's a pity, because so many positive things are
happening too, both at OLPC and Sugar Labs, and that part of the
message didn't get out.

Sean.


On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Thomas C
Gilliard<satellit at bendbroadband.com> wrote:
> Sean:
>
> I thought the quote on the link
>
> http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/hardware/0,39043471,62056166,00.htm
>
> said that:
>
> Sugar as OS was 'mistake'
> SINGAPORE--Putting a crank-shaft on the XO laptop was a mistake, but the
> biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application "on a vanilla
> Linux laptop", said OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte.
> "Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating
> system," he told ZDNet Asia in an interview. "But what we did…was we had
> Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management--it
> became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar
> became a bit of a mess."
> Negroponte added: "It should have been much cleaner, like the way they offer
> [it] on a stick now."
> The availability of the Sugar interface via a USB could possibly herald a
> "naked" XO laptop in future, said Negroponte, currently on leave from the
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
>
> NOT that sugar was a mistake....
>
> Tom Gilliard
>
>