[Sugar-devel] The future of Sugar on XO-1s

[Dave Crossland]

On 5 April 2016 at 20:29, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the Sugar community has made an extraordinary effort to keep the
> XO-1 experience viable.


I think that the Sugar community OUGHT to keep up that effort. It would be
immoral to abandon 1 million kids who are using XOs.

But I do not think XOs, and the python desktop, should be a primary focus
of the Sugar Labs vision and mission for the net 5 years.

If we lost 50% of them in 10 years, I expect we'll lose another 50% in the
next 5 years, and another 50% in 2 years, and 50% the year after that, and
it is still 100,000 machines for kids in the poorest regions. And then its
2024 and there will be $20 ChromeOS laptops and Google Loon.

Overall, as I've learned more about Sugar Labs in the last few weeks, I
think the general situation for the project today is really awesome!!

The finance aspect of SL today is interesting. It is fairly unusual that a
GPL project ends up sitting on a BUCKET of money - not a BIG bucket, but
still, c-a-p-i-t-a-l. The logic of capitalism is to reproduce the capital
bigger and bigger. A volunteer-led non-profit should still be following
that logic, in my opinion: I would like to see that in 12 months time, that
80k has been spent in ways that the SL balance is 160k or 240k.

GSOC and GCI are already funding some software advances, and the systems
team and github maintainers seem very active, so I think paying for
development doesn't make sense. I am also somewhat skeptical about paying
for translation, given that the current software overall is dying out.

But perhaps it should. I see at
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/graphs/contributors that Sugar is
basically a 10 year old technology. And it dying out is good news, in a
way... because Lionel has - I think - really done a SUPER amazing thing
with founding and leading the development of Sugarizer. The decline of the
Pythonic Sugar is like a bush fire, terrifying while it approaches but
afterwards has made room for essential new growth :)

When I met Walter for the first time at FSF Libre Planet, we talked for a
good couple of hours. In that time, we briefly discussed his disdain for
JavaScript, a common refrain in the libre software community -
http://pyjs.org, anyone? ;) Well, for me, if the only thing Sugar Labs did
in the next 5 years was help kids to learn Logo and then JS, that would be
a really powerful thing. 10 years ago I would have been satisfied if OLPC
had shipped Emacs without X Windows, because when I was 8 years old all I
got was a crappy BASIC prompt and no disk storage! :) So the current
porting of Python Activities to JavaScript, which can still be used within
the Python Sugar Desktop, is a really cool hack.

I would be happy if by 2020 the "classic" Sugar desktop was totally gone.
Zero Python! In its place could be a laptop OS derived from ChromiumOS,
plus a nodejs web server serving on localhost that is stuffed full of
activities and content.

I think SL became a cottage industry vendor of something like
http://solarspell.org that is preinstalled with that brimming-over httpd
configuration. The development graph of http://schoolserver.org is very
different to Sugar - https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/graphs/contributors -
which is a great way of adapting to $100 big screen phones and tablets. And
there are some clever things like https://outernet.is happening that make
updating the software on such servers in places that have no other network
connections easier and easier.

I think Sugar Labs can act as a focal point to inspire and educate people
to put them together by volunteers and sell them through Sugar Labs to
raise funds for the project; that's what the trademarks are for.

I think the first generation of kids like Samson should be found, and with
them developed some OER about co-operative business basics, so it is
textbook-clear how to start and run a Local Lab that pays its labor and
generates a surplus - not a profit - that is used to grow the whole thing.
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