[Sugar-devel] Vision

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

On 19 April 2016 at 21:30, Justin Overton <justin at polymath.ninja> wrote:

> I have some questio s about the vision of sugar after reading another
> thread about the conference.
>

Yes, I think these questions are very important - as I joined the project
last month this has also been a big concern for me. The Vision, Mission and
Strategy are all a bit worn out and need refreshing, and I've been drafting
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Vision_proposal_2016 as a proposal to present
at some point this year to be officially adopted.


> I like the idea of sugar as a platform, but I'm curious about how tied it
> is to OLPC hardware.
>

As I understand the history right now - please correct me if I'm wrong,
those of you who were there at the time - that this, in fact, was the
initial purpose of Sugar Labs - to take "Sugar the XO-1 OS" - which at the
time had some issues, per
http://web.archive.org/web/20140628135401/http://radian.org/notebook/nonsense-omelet
- and sieve out the "Sugar Desktop" so that it was no longer tied to the
XO-1's fedora derivative.

Since then almost all of the work - but not totally all - done in the
derivative has been put upstream, so that the fedora derivative that James
"Quozl" Cameron maintains for OLPC Inc - last release in Feburary,
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.7 - is pretty close to a
standard Fedora. And James, I must say, is doing a great job of keeping
Sugar working smoothly with that Fedora derivative.

Interestingly OLPC also offer XO-4s today with either Fedora+Sugar, or
Android, or Windows XP. I'm not sure how many Android units OLPC has
shipped, but I can not find any evidence that XP was - despite the gnashing
;) of teeth when it was announced - ever shipped by OLPC, even though MS
made it "work."
http://web.archive.org/web/20120706055249/http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9192
;)

Anyway, Sugar isn't tied to OLPC hardware, but it is tied to GNU; if your
computer can run Fedora or Ubuntu or another GNU distro, you can run Sugar.
However, all desktop OX are increasingly irrelevant, per
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=desktop+mobile+graph -
specifically
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unified-communications/files/2015/04/Goolge-graph-1.png
which is from http://a16z.com/2014/10/28/mobile-is-eating-the-world/ which
I found well worth the time to study closely.


> Is there a larger vision to create a platform that can be used in a more
> widespread fashion? I discovered this project after getting tired of all
> the freemium apps that trick my young kids into buying things.
>
Welcome to the software freedom movement :D

> I love the idea of sugar, but it's been around a while and the it still
> seems a bit esoteric. I'd be more than happy to start cranking out code if
> I can see the bigger picture.
>
I personally think http://sugarizer.org is the future of the project; I
think all the python stuff will be irrelevant in 5 years, if it hasn't
completely stagnated; and this is made plain by visiting
https://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/statistics/ and setting Group By to
Month and then Months to 36.

But this is just my opinion, and surely some of the long time contributors
won't agree with me on this, eg
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2016-April/051861.html :)
Indeed the whole "The future of Sugar on XO-1s" thread -
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2016-April/thread.html -
might be a good introduction to some of the bigger picture. There's also
www.amazon.com/Learning-Change-World-Social-Impact/dp/0230337317 which I've
read, and is the best single introduction to the history I found so far,
although it is somewhat light-weight, and naturally only runs up to 2012
when it was published.

One of the co-authors, Walter, is still part of the community leadership
committee (SLOBs), and has ported one of the capstone Activities -
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027 - to JS -
https://turtle.sugarlabs.org - and this seems like a good case study in
what a Sugarizer Activity looks like when someone intimately familiar with
Sugar Desktop takes a crack. I'm curious if others here can provide other
examples of 'case study' Sugarizer activities :)

This year Sugar Labs had around 40 GSOC applications, and got 6 slots, and
on Friday the proposal selections will be announced. I think helping these
all succeed is probably what the Sugar developer community can have the
most impact doing in the next few months.

> In the meantime I'm trying to find a way to target sugar and Android
> without duplicating core logic.
>
Bingo: For the transition between the JS future and today,
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-web is already here - it allows you to
wrap an activity made for Sugarizer into a Sugar Desktop activity.

-- 
Cheers
Dave
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