Hi Sam On Jun 22, 2016 9:45 PM, "Samuel Greenfeld" <sam...@greenfeld.org> wrote: > > Historically there have been several organizations financially supporting > Sugar development. > > But at least some of those have left, others have reduced their > contributions, and it is unclear to me if any new groups have made > significant tangible investments in the project.
Right. I'm pretty sure the only financial support this year is from olpc inc in the form of James Cameron's time, and google in gsoc/gci stipend donations. Again, I think the Trip Advisor capital was a one-time donation and it must be spent in a way that creates surplus value, increasing the financial resources of the project, rather than spent in ways that decrease it. > The XO laptop and icon, both commonly associated with Sugar, are OLPC > trademarks. There is nothing stopping anyone from licensing these and > putting applications in the Android/Apple/Chromebook stores claiming to be > "Based on Sugar" with a new "Journal" interface. I expect no one is interested in those trademarks, given One Education isn't using them today and was interested in them in the past. I speculate either olpc inc isn't licensing them at all, or their price is prohibitive; and I suspect the former is more likely. However, I also think that anyone can make a journalling launcher and reimplement other good ideas from sugar, and similar to Walter's reply, I would be very happy to see sugars ideas reimplemented - as that would validate they are indeed as good an idea as we assume they are. > In short: Sugar is having trouble expanding beyond its current territory, or > at least publicly appears to be. Rather, I would say that Sugar has lost most of its territory - ALSO download metrics show Sugar usage has fallen by 90% over 3 years. > So this week I thought of a couple of questions: > What would cause you and/or your school(s) to stop using Sugar? It appears to me that the number of people subscribed to this list who regularly engage a school deployment can be counted on one hand - eg I believe that Tony and Adam are - but the number people who can speak for "their school" as in their employer is zero. I'll be very happy to hear I am mistaken about this, though! :) I offer the following speculative user stories for existing institutional users of Sugar Desktop to quit: 1. "I'm not dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop, but I can not continue to use it because the school district or other higher state power has now mandated that I use certain software but Sugar Desktop can't run it - either web based, such as Google Classroom or Blackboard, or desktop based for the Windows or Android platforms. (While we have Sugarizer that they could use alongside such software, Lionel said last month that as far as he knows no schools use it.)"; 2. "I'm not dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop, but I can not continue to use it because I'm not aware of any contemporary cheap rugged laptops that I can buy with Sugar pre-installed and a support contract, and I'm not able to organize installing it on commodity hardware and supporting it myself"; 3. "I'm dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop because I want it to never crash (I know of 5 reproducible crashes that went unfixed for more than 12 months, and we hate it because we lose our work)"; 4. "I'm dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop because I want better existing features (I know of 5 obvious big problems that went unaddressed for more than 12 months, and we hate it because we know software should get better over time)"; 5. I'm dissatisfied with Sugar Desktop because I want different/new features (I know of 5 obvious new activities that no one has started creating, and we hate it because we want to do new things); > What would another project have to offer in order for it to be used instead? As I wrote above, the most obvious allure of other projects is that they are not "total" platforms, but integrate with other software - likely proprietary - that the school has already licensed. I heard from Sridhar who was CTO of OLPC-AU that he had debates with schools that computers should even be available to young kids in classrooms, and that today the situation has totally changed and now schools not only agree that they should be available, but now expect to continue using software that they are using and will not give up on. > When would it be a good idea to move everyone to a new project? I think that Sugar Desktop will have 100,000+ users on XO-1s until 2020 (representing 10%+ of the number of laptops sold) and so it makes sense to continue the project until then. If in the next 4 years there is no increase in the number of daily downloads from ASLO (or a similar daily active use metric) then I think 2020 when the XO-1s become unmaintainable will be a good date to shut everything down. I hope that in the next 4 years, Sugar Labs can push those metrics back up to where they were 3 years ago, and can succeeded at working with existing institutional users to transition to new non-XO hardware as the XOs die off; and that, during those 4 years, every inch of Python code will be ported to JavaScript so that Sugar becomes "a web app," but one that is packaged for totally offline usage on XOs, Chromebooks, Android devices, iOS devices, as well as Windows, OSX and libre desktops. > Under what circumstances should Sugar Labs be shutdown? I think that the only circumstances that Sugar Labs should be shut down is when no one is interested in maintaining any Sugar software, and no one is interested in signing a contract with Conservancy (or another umbrella org) to continue it, holds its trademarks, raise funds for it, etc. > If we can answer these questions, maybe we can reform Sugar to better meet > these competitive challenges. I think Sugar Desktop's reformation to meet these challenges has been underway for some time in the form of Sugarizer. Three cheers for Lionel! :) However, Lionel told me that, as far as he knows, there are no schools using Sugarizer. Does anyone know of any? Cheers Dave _______________________________________________ Marketing mailing list Marketing@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing