On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Edward Cherlin wrote: > 2008/4/22 Martin Edmund Sevior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> >> I've stayed away from this discussion until now. But for my own part, if the >> OLPC becomes just another laptop running "standard" educational software of >> the kind that inhabits my daughters primary school, I'm no longer interested >> in the project. > > Hear, hear! > >> I really bought into the "new paradigm" of pervasive collaboration and >> constructionist education. I'm not particularly interested in a cheap laptop >> clone and in any case I guess my own work on Write and abicollab will be >> ditched for some stripped down version of MS Word. >> >> It would nice to know if this is the new vision or not. If it is the new >> vision I can stop wasting my time here. > > You can join the imminent fork of Sugar, and we can continue to do it > right. It won't be the first time that an entire team has deserted an > Open Source project leader, as Bruce Perens himself can tell you. He > says that in several cases where a team left him, they were right and > he was wrong.
If there is a fork, I would hope that it's not just a 'official OLPC' vs 'the old OLPC software' fork. it need to split the existing OLPC software into seperate system and userspace pieces. Sugar in an innovative approach to the UI, but there are lots of things about it that don't work well yet (the 7 seconds to start a trivial app through sugar, vs <1 sec outside of sugar for example) I also think that the set of people who do very good work at the system level doesn't overlap much with the set of people who do very good work at the uer level, so seperating the two could let each group focus on what they're good at more and make faster progress. for example, the current discussion about backups seems odd to me. from a system level there should be a half dozen backup implementations (especially since you know exactly where the data you need to backup and restore is). ideally these implementations would then each get a trivial GUI face added to them, and users could either choose between them, or the UI team(s) could pick the one that they like best for their 'feel' and enhance it. instead there are a handful of partial scripts that nobody seems eager to work on becouse they can't be used without full integration into the GUI. the XO hardware in extremely impressive (I have two of them, a roomate has a third, and I would probably buy more if I could), but I have been very disappointed with the software. the good news is that the XO specific modifications are finally getting into the valilla kernel, and as they get there I will be able to consider ditching sugar/fedora and switch to other distros that will work better. I hope that Mary Lou is making good progress with her new machines, as I look forward to more great choices in the future. David Lang _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel