"Morgan Collett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration.
This is great! The best thing OLPC could do to improve activity collaboration is to get it working for ordinary programs -- running on the X Window System, or on MacOSX, or Windows. Why doesn't AbiWord already collaborate with Write? Why doesn't Firefox collaborate with Browse? It's the same code base. Tying collaboration to Sugar is a losing strategy. Once the rest of the world figures out that *their* programs should be trivial to collaborate in too, they'll reimplement collaboration (likely in an incompatible way). Then Sugar's collaboration will be an orphan rather than the mainstream. Instead, if OLPC's collaboration code supported cross-platform collaboration, OLPC's model and its implementing code would spread throughout the whole computing infrastructure. And that would bring in a new pile of contributors, enhancing, debugging, and porting it everywhere. Easy collaboration is one of OLPC's key advantages over its competition. Making that a reality for all the kids (and adults) in the world requires a broader vision. Merely debugging what makes Sugar apps fail to collaborate under load, or getting a few more Sugar authors to add collaboration, won't suffice. John PS: If there is a simple way to install a couple of RPM's or DEB's, add a paragraph of code and a few automake macros, and add collaboration to any program written in C or C++, then please document it! (If on the other hand "it only works in Python" and "requires sugar-jhbuild" then there's some work to be done.) PPS: This review of AbiWord says: http://www.linux.com/feature/131852 The new AbiWord supposedly offers real-time document collaboration developed for the OLPC project and implemented by means of an experimental plugin. As per the AbiWord-2.6 release notes, there are three implementations of the plugin, one for the OLPC, and two (an XMPP-based one and a pure TCP/IP one) for Linux. The Linux plugins compiled without any issues, but AbiWord couldn't activate them. The plugin isn't currently available for Windows. [abiword.com says the Windows plugin is available on 2.6.2 now. But I never did find the collab plugin, nor any documentation for it. The 2.6.0 release notes imply that the three available collab plugins can't actually interoperate with each other!] _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel