[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Philippe Clérié]

Your points are well taken and generally I agree with them. Except 
that I never suggested you should "abandon upstream development". 
Sugar is your calling card, your differentiator, your trademark, your 
value added... etc, etc, etc. It's what make you, you. :-) I would 
never think of abandoning it.

I also differ on the question of attracting more people. I think more 
focus is better than less, but I am willing to suspend disbelief. 
But that gives me an opportunity to bring up a point that I find much 
more interesting. I believe Sugar has a peculiar problem to solve. 

You need to somehow bring together educators and developpers around 
a particular philosophy of education. The intersection of those sets 
appears to be a very small set. You need to widen that set. I think 
a dedicated distribution might help. It would be a point of focus.

Cheers, 

-- 


Philippe

------
The trouble with common sense is that it is so uncommon.
<Anonymous>

On Saturday 29 August 2009 08:56:39 Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> 2009/8/29 Philippe Clérié <philippe at gcal.net>:
> > Well, I wasn't attempting to solve anything. I thought I was
> > just brainstorming.
> >
> > These past few weeks there have been a lot of discussions about
> > processes. Meanwhile, I am heading into the classroom with a
> > somewhat unstable and unfinished platform not to mention very
> > little guidance as to exactly how to make this thing work. I'll
> > probably let the kids take the lead.
> >
> > Calling Sugar a distribution might not solve anything
> > (certainly not my own problems), but it might help us focus on
> > the practical matter of deciding how to put out that
> > distibution instead of arguing about how to decide what we're
> > about to do.
>
> Ok, so the idea is to focus our resources on the distribution
> level? I'm not very fond of that because:
>
> - we aren't a company that has resources and puts them wherever
> its management says so. Work is done by volunteers and they work
> on whatever they fancy. I think that having less focus is useful
> here because brings more interested people onboard that we
> otherwise wouldn't have.
>
> - polishing a distribution is _lots_ of work. Canonical, Novell,
> Redhat, etc. are putting lots of resources into there. I think
> that a small set of people can take one of those distros and make
> it work better for a specific use case, but we aren't going to
> outrun the big players in a generic, polished distro.
>
> - other organizations are already taking Sugar and distro bits
> and putting them together for their specific use cases. Maybe no
> one is doing that yet for your use cases, but I don't think it
> means that we need to drop whatever we are doing and do that
> instead. If we have opportunities open and advertise them
> properly, we may get people to do the work.
>
> - if we abandon upstream development, what point is in packaging
> it?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
> > --
> >
> >
> > Philippe
> >
> > ------
> >
> >> So is the only problem what we are calling Sugar today? If we
> >> rename SoaS to Sugar and Sugar to Sucrose, how we would be
> >> solving anything?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Tomeu
> >
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