WSJ

[Sameer Verma]

Ed Trager wrote:
> I have a few comments for this thread:
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> (1) Porting Sugar+Activities to Competitors' Offerings : No.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Nov 29, 2007 12:12 AM, Mike C. Fletcher <mcfletch at vrplumber.com> wrote:
>   
>> Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>> ...
>>     
>>>>         * we should port to the other inexpensive laptops, if a country
>>>>           decides to go with EEEs or Classmates, we should be in there
>>>>           offering an EEE or Classmate-optimised Sugar + Activities +
>>>>           Content that they can load onto those machines
>>>>         
>
> I disagree.  Especially in light of the high profile that OLPC has
> because of recent articles like the Wall Street Journal article, the
> OLPC team and community should continue to focus their efforts on
> their own hardware platform and not worry about EEEs or Classmates.
>
> To create EEE- or Classmate-optimised Sugar+Activities will only help
> Asus and Intel sell more EEEs and Classmates.  While Negroponte can
> say that OLPC is "an education project" , it is an education project
> with some real hardware that needs to be sold.  This is just common
> business sense that applies to non-profits like OLPC just as much as
> it does to profit-making organizations like Intel.
>
>   

Since the platform (Sugar + Activities) are all in the free and open
source domain, any group of interested individuals can pick this up and
port it to other hardware, test it out and iron the bugs etc. be it for
Classmate PC or Eee or Dell, or your favorite flavor of the day. I agree
with Ed however, that at this point, the platform is more than Sugar +
Activities. It is fine-tuned (or is being fine-tuned) for the XO and
that's where the focus should be. So many other efforts seem to focus on
the hardware and then maybe the OS (let's put Linux on the Eee or
Classmate PC and we are done) that people tend to forget that the
"platform" works really well as a package: hardware + OS + activities
(apps) + network and so, if you substitute any one of the components,
you will be distracting from the goals of the project. If Classmate or
Eee are interested, they should really work with OLPC to port the stack
to their hardware.

In so many ways, this approach is like what Apple does or what Sun did
and still tries to do. Hardware + OS + Apps. With OLPC, the network (p2p
mesh and AP mode) also happens to be very central to the entire effort

I am sure Eee and Classmate PC have enthusiastic crowds supporting their
efforts. They should set up their mailing lists and get going. Start
here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html

As for "for-profit" vs "non-profit" they both need business plans, which
must have sustainable revenue to offset the expenses.

cheers,
Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/