Walter leaving and shift to XP.

[Carol Lerche]

The OLPC Association has done amazing things with limited resources and
deserves to take great pride in this.  However, this Negroponte quotation
from the article seems correct to me:

He lamented that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the
XOs, saying Sugar "grew amorphously" and "didn't have a software architect
who did it in a crisp way." For instance, the laptops do not support Flash
animation, widely used on the Web.

"There are several examples like that, that we have to address without
worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he
said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source
fundamentalist."
You have to prioritize your goals when they conflict.  The question to
consider -- is it really the case that having a 100% pure open source
platform is more important IN THE SHORT TERM than making a type of content
available that is ubiquitous as a format for delivering educational
content.  Gnash is simply not an equivalent product to the Adobe player IN
THE SHORT TERM and it would have been a pragmatic choice to work hard to get
Adobe to permit their flash player to be shipped with the XO.

By making these tradeoffs of upholding purity of open source when teachers
and school/ed ministry people obviously prioritize the content ahead of the
purity of the implementation,  one ends up in a place where time is short
and an MS port may be catching up.  Of course the target audience will
prefer the solution on which they can deliver the content they want.
Essentially the attempt at total purity may result in a much worse outcome
with respect to the open source goal.

Recriminations against Negroponte are less productive than learning from the
consequences of trying to achieve an overly ambitious constellation of
conflicting goals. Instead  reach the goals in priority order through
realistic, explicit, predictable and explainable phasing, as now seems to be
the plan.  Certainly, if Walter manages to get funding for a project to
expand sugar for other platforms it will assist in reaching the final
target.  More resources will be available to attack the problems posed by
adopting an entirely new user interface such as sugar, while being asked to
deliver applications and content that are the most understandable part of
the OLPC package to the adopters..
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