[SoaS] [IAEP][DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel

[Peter Robinson]

Thank you Martin. I think that is spot on!

>> We've been a distro distributor for months - from the before the
>> beta-1 Sugar on a Stick announcement.
>
> Who's we?  sugaronastick.com?  Sugar Labs members?  Let's be clear:
> Sugar Labs does not have the staff to compete with Canonical or Fedora
> as a distro vendor.  So please help me understand to what "distro
> distributor" tasks you think the DP should propose to SLOB.

It would be interesting to see how many people are using SoaS over
something like the installable options from the distros such as the
sugar desktop group option in Fedora. This obv wouldn't include the
XO-1s. Of the 5 devices I have that have sugar installed. 2 are the
802 XO release, and 3 are Fedora (although one of those will go to
SoaS for some testing eventually).

>> And, we are marketing it with success (cf. worldwide tech press
>> coverage, the BBC, etc).
>
> How many people are using it?  Satisfied with SoaS as a distro?
> What's the target deployment size, and what SL support will be
> required?

I would think not massive amounts. Do we have download stats of SoaS.
If so how many, what regions etc. Any idea off demographic or
deployments?

> I'm not saying it can't be done.  I'm saying I don't see any agreement
> on what it is or who's going to do it.  Without that we should...
>
>> We can do this because we are very, very careful not to overpromise.
>
> ...not overpromise :).
>
>> Part of our work is to jumpstart a support ecosystem.
>
> To the extent this impacts SoaS, this sounds like wishful thinking.
> Who's doing this?  With what plan?  What targets are there?  Why do we
> believe they'll be met?

I know from trying to get a grass roots group together in the UK this
is very hard. There's a small core group doing the pilot and a dozen
or so others that show up on occasion. From my observation its not
that different on the olpc and sugar tech mailing lists (I'm not on
iaep but we are after all talking about creating a distro ). You see
the same group of people posting to the list all the time. You then
get the occasional drive by asking a question.

>> It's certainly not easy, but it's not impossible, in my view.
>
> "Not impossible" covers a lot of ground.  What happened to not
> overpromising :).

I would like to see some stats. Who has access to the download stats
of "SoaS Strawberry". I would almost bet that I could create an
official Fedora Spin called "Fedora Sugar Spin" for the Fedora 13
release and get it on their main download site and get almost as many
downloads as SoaS and with the combination of SugarLabs and Fedora
marketing get as much or even more press coverage.

Peter