[Sugar-devel] 0.82 activity updates

[David Farning]

This is a hard question.  There is an inherent tension between
software purchasers and software developers.

Developers want the latest and greatest.  Every six months a new
release with new features, new technology and new bugs.

Purchasers want stability.  In this case, the school districts want
proven and tested solutions.

As a result we are going to have situations, such as currently exit,
where deployments will be running one to three years behind the
development tree.

The million dollars question (literally) is, 'who is responsible (and
pays) for ongoing maintenance of past Sugar releases which are in use
by deployments?'

This leads to the philosophical questions of what do 'communities' do
well and what do 'communities' not do well.  The short answer is that
communities excel at commoditizing platforms; they suck at service and
support.

The simple truth is that businesses are in it for the money.  Publicly
held companies have legal obligations to their share holders to make
money.  Companies make that money buy getting customers to feel there
is enough value in their products to purchase them.

Communities can enhance, and disrupt this process, by commoditizing or
reducing the cost of goods or services to near zero.  Commoditizing
products does not eliminate the revenue in an industry.  Instead, it
tends to shift the revenue from organizations which hold control
points to other parts of the industry.

Communities commodify a product by providing an incentive for
individuals and organizations to work together to reduce costs rather
then fight for product differentiation around a good or service.

Communities suck at service and support.  In the final mile there will
_have_ to be an non-Sugar Labs organization providing service and
support for deployments.  Theses organizations may be
philanthropically or for-profit, they made be governmental or they may
be business focused.

So, this seemingly simple question opens a huge can of worms.  As we
look for answer I would like to emphases the importance of Sugar Labs
as the organization which focuses on uniting the 'players' in the
technology in early childhood education around collaboratatively
developing a comodity platform and ecosystem around that platform.

With all that being said, the goal for Sugar Labs should be, 'How can
Sugar Labs help you support your local deployment?'

david


On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In Paraguay we'd like to roll out a new Browse release for sugar 0.82
> including this fix:
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8857
>
> Could/should I do this officially through the appropriate Browse git
> branch? I think we already have a problem with overlapping version
> numbers between the releases for 0.82 and 0.84.
>
> Daniel
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