[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[David Farning]

2009/8/29 Philippe Clérié <philippe at gcal.net>:
> 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.

I would like to add one nuance to this.  The success of Sugar Labs
depends a _union_ of educators and developers sharing a common mission
and vision that Sugar, and any associated hardware, is a viable,
useful, and cost effective teaching tools.

Your statement is currently correct.  Many Sugar Labs participants sit
at the intersection of open source developers and educators.  This
will continue to be true until: a. Sugar is easy enough for educator
to use as  cost effective teaching tool. and b. Sugar Labs, as a
project, is a viable enough to engage, and empower smart, passionate
developers.

My faith in in the feasibility of Sugar Labs is that the conditions a
and b are circular dependencies.  A great project will create a great
product and a great product will create a  great project.

david

> 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
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Sugar-devel mailing list
>> > Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
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