Collaborative Activity Development

[Bobby Powers]

yes, this looks like a great start!  I'm just getting my feet wet with
development (got sugar-jhbuild working today! ;), and was wondering if
anyone has had experience, or examples, of software on regular laptop
collaborating with an XO?  Is this even possible, and if it isn't then is
there a way I can help make it happen?  It would be great for me (and
others!) if I could develop a mac or linux version of an activity and have
them talk to its sister app on some XOs
Bobby

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:02 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:

> "Morgan Collett" <morgan.collett at gmail.com> 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!]
>
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