[Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Samuel Greenfeld]

There are at least two types of "deployments"/"customers" that Sugar has.

The first is the small, volunteer group.  To them, it doesn't matter what
OS they actually are using, or (to some extent) how well tested things
are.  They just want to come in, try something with their students, and if
they need to tweak something or something breaks, it's no big deal.

The second is the large deployment.  And large deployments, like large
corporations, do not want to deploy Sugar widely unless they have a chance
to thoroughly check it out.


First, they might investigate a bit to see who currently uses Sugar, and if
there are any other users they can get recommendations from.  Then they
might look into Sugar Labs, asking about Sugar's history, what warranties
were available, the future roadmap for features, etc.  They may insist on
having a face-to-face meeting with a Sugar representative, where they could
ask detailed questions.

You might laugh but when the OLPC Association was actively answering bids
for laptops, this dance happened all the time.

When large corporations sell things to each other, support can be
everything.  It doesn't mean that they are going to use it.  But if they
need a patch for critical bug on the President's laptop, or the latest
Shellshock or Heartbleed that their bosses' boss' saw in the news, they
want to have something or someone they can point to definitely get support.

Very few deployments have invested in the resources to internally make
their own OS images at that level of detail.


I don't want to go into it too much in this email, but dealing with large
organizations can be a very different thing.



On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:37 AM, Tony Anderson <tony_anderson at usa.net> wrote:

> I don't know what is puzzling. I can understand a deployment wanting
> assurance of long-term support for Sugar. I doubt there are many
> deployments that even know what Fedora or Ubuntu means. Even fewer that
> understand the difference between SugarLabs and Red Hat or Canonical as
> sources of this support.
>
> The word deployment may be a puzzle, In some cases it as a national
> ministry or OLPC Australia. For most of us, it is a school or other
> institution which has acquired OLPC laptops and is attempting to make use
> of them.
>
> There are many deployments which have never updated their image. In
> general, an update to an XO requires someone to come to the school
> with the technical expertise to do so. I am sure there are schools which
> have never seen such a visitor since they received their laptops.
> The positive element is that the laptops work as they always have. The
> downside, of course, is that the users have no chance to benefit from
> the new capabilities available from current releases.
>
> Finally, what urgent security fixes are required by a deployment with no
> access to the internet?
>
> Tony
>
>
> On 05/08/2015 12:55 AM, sugar-devel-request at lists.sugarlabs.org wrote:
>
>> When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
>>> >and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
>>> >No deployment change their image more than once a year.
>>> >In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
>>> >the big/middle size deployments.?
>>>
>> This continues to puzzle me.  LTS is a stream of security updates, and
>> you say the deployments do not apply them until the next year?
>>
>> And yet they want them?
>>
>> They want something they don't use?
>>
>
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