[Marketing] Little Brother the Book

[David Farning]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll read that, thanks Caroline!
>
> It's hard for me to make time to read, for the past three weeks I've
> been alternating between a pair of Python books in English I picked up
> in the UK and David Starkey's outstanding new biography of the young
> Henry VIII... prior to that was two books on the Wars of the Roses,
> more contemporary than the series on the Knights Templar,
> Hospitallers, and Cathars I've been on since my visits to Rhodes and
> Carcassonne.
>
> Re Linux image, impact on Sugar, etc. Actually I don't worry very much
> about how GNU/Linux is perceived, the bigger problem is its
> fragmentation... many people discover a distribution and think it is
> "Linux" when in fact they have seen only one interpretation. For
> example the Asus Xandros distribution on my EeePC was easy to use, but
> the repositories were never updated and "simple mode" was
> frustratingly locked-down; that experience is very different from the
> Linpus on my Acer netbook, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. Microsoft has
> historically exploited this fragmentation, but at the end of the year
> they will have three OSes in production... they may have their own
> fragmentation issues

Reducing fragmentation was the main purpose behind Eclipse.  At the
time, there was no viable competitor to Visual Studio in the the IDE
space.  Every IDE backed by a signal company fell prey to Microsoft.
In the Open source world, their were tens, if not hundreds, of IDEs of
varying quality.  Each with a relativity small development community
behind it.

IBM took the lead and united fierce competitors to work
collaboratively to create eclipse.  I think that we can successfully
position Sugar Labs as the eclipse of the Education market.

Currently, their are hundreds, if not thousands, of education projects
just waiting for a mantel under which to unite.   The more projects
Sugar Labs can unite, the most value sugar will have for its
'learners'.

This is not going to be an easy process.  One of biggest challenges
with large, quickly growing projects is managing the over all project
direction.  Every individual contributor has specific goals and a
specific direction which they think the project should go.  If we are
not careful contributors can feel disappointed, angry, and even
mislead if things do not go their way.  (If this seems tough, imagine
the possible tension when contributor are companies and countries with
their own agendas and neuroses:)

Uniting the many open source projects together while remaining true to
the Sugar vision is possible.

david
> Sean
>
>
> On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 11:03 PM, Caroline Meeks
> <caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
>> :) I figured I was behind the curve, (I am after all well over 25) but I
>> wanted to make sure no one else on this list is even further behind then I
>> am!
>>
>> On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Seth Woodworth <seth at isforinsects.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Luke packaged the book as a .xol bundle about 10 months ago:
>>>
>>> http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.xol
>>>
>>> --Seth
>>>
>>> On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Caroline Meeks
>>> <caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
>>>>
>>>> If you haven't read it yet please do, especially Sean. The hero is a high
>>>> school hacker and the them is freedom.  Its a good book and a compelling
>>>> read.
>>>>
>>>> It  will probably win the Hugo this year and will be well read by geeky
>>>> young adults and the people who read like them, which is certainly our
>>>> developer, blogger and tech reporter populations!
>>>>
>>>> It features a dystopian view of computers in schools and computer
>>>> surveillance but on of the heros' effective tools is a version of Linux.
>>>> I'll let Sean tell us if its good or bad for Sugar's image. :)
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Caroline Meeks
>>>> Solution Grove
>>>> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>>>>
>>>> 617-500-3488 - Office
>>>> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Marketing mailing list
>>>> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Caroline Meeks
>> Solution Grove
>> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>>
>> 617-500-3488 - Office
>> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Marketing mailing list
>> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>>
>>
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