Sumit,
Great questions, and they're particularly relevant at this phase/age of
the existence of Sugar Labs. They certainly can't be answered in a
single e-mail, however I think this is a perfect conversation to have,
particularly on our IAEP mailing list, which is our general purpose
mailing list.
Sumit Srivastava wrote on 3/28/19 5:00 PM:
Do we aim to be like Red Hat? Canonical? No match? Who are we closest
to? Who do we aim to be?
Speaking as an Oversight Board member, I do not believe it is in the
interest of Sugar Labs to attempt to emulate a company like Red Hat and
Canonical. These companies have hundreds/thousands of paid employees,
and their organizational structure is a product of the needs of their
corporate customers.
Right now, we have a few existential problems on the horizon, one of
which is a long term problem, but which we now need to address in the
short-term: Maintainability. Sugar has a lot of "technical debt", and
unless we can complete our goal of 100% Python 3 compatibility of all
core Sugar libraries and the toolkit, we risk the loss of being able to
be run as a desktop environment on current versions of Linux, due to our
reliance on Python 2. Since Python 2 has been on life support for many,
many years, and is only nine months from being officially retired, it
will no longer be maintained by the Python Foundation, nor included by
default in the next versions of Fedora and Ubuntu. You can read further
details about the sunsetting of Python 2 at https://pythonclock.org
<https://pythonclock.org/>
<https://pythonclock.org/>
I understand that these are a lot of questions. You can also share
relevant mail archive links if they're available.
I also understand that we're a non profit and the organisations I
mentioned might not be a close match.
I personally do not think the core entity of Sugar Labs should be a
commercial entity, but non-profit organizations are completely entitled
to be profitable, and many are quite for the profitable. Personally, I
would like to see the development of a federated model, where we have
country/regionally-centered "chapters" of Sugar Labs, with Sugar Labs
itself taking the in-the-field feedback from our distributed user base,
and incorporating and triaging suggestions/feedback,
Essense of my question: If we could achieve anything, what would we want?
I would love to see a world where Sugar was used extensively, worldwide,
by children in the primary school age range, with a wide range of
actively-maintained activities, relevant to the current curricula of a
variety of countries, and of interest to elementary school teachers,
across all socioeconomic groups. How we get there is the real question,
assuming we want to, and have the organizational will to do so.
As for what our "long term vision" is, I honestly don't think we have
one at this point, and we should fix that, which is one of the reasons
why I chose to run for the Sugar Labs Oversight Board. Our next meeting
is next Friday, on 2019-04-05 at 20:00 UTC, on IRC, in the
#sugar-meeting channel on FreeNode. Feel free to join us and observe, as
well as ask questions before and after the official meeting commences.
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board
Regards
Sumit Srivastava
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
