[Sugar-devel] Fructose activities (was Re: [IAEP] ASLO Suggestion)

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Basically calling Fructose "demo activities" was just a way to chicken  
> out. Nobody wanted to impose a fixed set of activities on anyone, or  
> label non-Fructose activities as less important. All the long-timers  
> still understand that this is the basic set of activities that Sugar  
> Labs itself committed to support, so maybe the "demo" label should be  
> removed now.

It's a bit more complex than that.  My favorite analogy is to Gnome.
Almost no distribution actually ships the complete Gnome by default, which
would include Gnumeric, Abiword, Epiphany, Evolution, Empathy, and many
other programs.  (Instead, distros typically substitute OOo Calc, OOo
Write, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Pidgin.)  Gnome produces these programs
in order to ensure that they are providing a complete desktop environment,
but with full expectation that distributors will discard many and add others.

Our initial model for the distribution of Sugar was to assume that
ministries of education would create and distribute customized machine
images, configured to their liking.  We had no control over what
Activities they would ship, and there was no point claiming otherwise.
Our more recent work, such as small-scale school deployments, has afforded
us a much greater degree of control than we expected to have.

Anyway, that's the story.

--Ben

P.S. Fructose (et. al.) are codenames.  Users shouldn't need to know about
them.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20090611/ca69f4a1/attachment.pgp