[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] [SLOBS] SLOBs Position on SoaS

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Daniel Drake wrote:

>> I wonder, though, if the current SoaS is going to be the primary 
>> LiveUSB distribution of Sugar supported by upstream (known as SoaS).
>
> I think Sugar should treat all downstreams equally, so there would be no 
> primary distro. But users/deployments may prefer one or the other based 
> on quality/performance/stability/....
>
>> Daniel, yes, I think this question needs to be asked.
>
> I still don't understand how this affects the work your doing from 
> anything other than a prosperity standpoint.

Because SoaS has become the de facto "product" that we put into the hands 
of most users.

And because Sebastian has borne the majority of the workload of producing 
SoaS.

And because there are a number of requests that are not in fact Sugar 
requests, but are specific requests of SoaS -- i.e. optimizing the 
persistent USB experience, or creating a boothelper disk -- that are, 
therefore, distro-specific work.

And because this, when you put it all together, is an awful lot of work to 
ask someone to do, and to continue to do in the future, to then turn 
around and say "thanks for all the work you've done *when no one else 
would do it* to make SoaS a great experience -- but just so you know, we 
reserve the right to turn around tomorrow and say 'thanks, but we're gonna 
go another direction'."

If I were Sebastian, or any overworked volunteer, I would be asking the 
exact same questions.

It's a fine thing to make Sugar distro-agnostic.  But right now SoaS is 
the closest thing to a "product" we have, and we market it that way. 
It's not unreasonable for the single person volunteering to be responsible 
for that "product" to know that his work won't be shoved to the side.

--g

--
Computer Science professors should be teaching open source.
Help make it happen.   Visit http://teachingopensource.org.