[sugar] [Community-news] where is Walter?

Tue Apr 22 23:40:05 EDT 2008

I've stayed away from this discussion until now. But for my own part, if the OLPC becomes just another laptop running "standard" educational software of the kind that inhabits my daughters primary school, I'm no longer interested in the project.

I really bought into the "new paradigm" of pervasive collaboration and constructionist education. I'm not particularly interested in a cheap laptop clone and in any case I guess my own work on Write and abicollab will be ditched for some stripped down version of MS Word.

It would nice to know if this is the new vision or not. If it is the new vision I can stop wasting my time here.

Martin Sevior

-----Original Message-----
From: sugar-bounces at lists.laptop.org on behalf of Stephen John Smoogen
Sent: Wed 4/23/2008 1:18 PM
To: cpreimesberger at comcast.net
Cc: sugar; devel-list; Walter Bender; community-news at laptop.org
Subject: Re: [sugar] [Community-news] where is Walter?

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:58 AM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Chris Preimesberger
>  <cpreimesberger at comcast.net> wrote:
>  > Walter, you have been a shining light of good information for all this
>  >  time, and it's sad to see you pull away from the project.  Sad to see
>  >  the project melting away, too -- at least that's my impression.
>  >
>
>  One standard thing I have seen is that every project goes through
>  these cycles. Developers/leaders leave a company, project or group
>  and the people who identified the project with those people post that
>  the project as "shriveling up and dying". I remember people saying
>  this of Debian, early Linux kernel development, Red Hat, SuSE, GNOME,
>  KDE, etc. Sometimes its true, but mostly its a gut reaction because
>  our brains are wired to identify with 'leaders' for our survival. If
>  our leaders leave the tribe.. we should go with them. Its a deep urge
>  we all have but it is rarely rooted in 'reality' but in the minds way
>  of coming up with 'reasons'.
>
>  I am just commenting on this because its something I have seen over
>  and over again with companies, projects, and groups.. and it
>  interested me why one day I was all happy to be working for a company
>  and 2 days later was ready to leave because it was going to crap when
>  a developer I worked under left.
>
>  The big thing I learned was that companies, projects, groups, etc
>  change constantly, and people who thrive under some conditions
>  deteriorate under others.. and have to leave. And when that happens,
>  there are a lot of psychological shifts in the group where other
>  people stay and leave because various 'leaders' stayed or left.. in
>  some cases you end up with large scisms where people will no longer
>  talk with each other, and in other cases you have people agreeing to
>  disagree on where each group is going.
>

On the other hand, comments from the AP article can make me eat crow :)

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hXa0O9XLMsWfaqt-sI9FqFy2IewgD9074MH82

For about a year, however, Microsoft has been working to get a
slimmed-down version of Windows to run on XO laptops. As a result,
Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a "dual-boot"
option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar.

One current hang-up is whether the necessary hardware would add $7 to
$12 to an XO's cost, taking the project even further away from its
eventual goal of producing the machines for less than $100.
Eventually, Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating
system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"
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