Walter leaving and shift to XP.

[Tom Hoffman]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Torello Querci <torello at torosoft.com> wrote:

>  >  If is possible to use normal windows application on top Sugar+Windows the
>  >  educational project is broken because the developers what need to write a
>  >  program (program not activity) write it on windows because in this manner one
>  >  PC with windows can run it, and XO "XPzed" too .... so why write code for
>  >  sugar? In this scenario Sugar is dead and OLPC became a Laptop organization

If Sugar cannot offer any advantages to developers writing
applications for children beyond those already offered by Windows XP,
it will fail regardless.

>  Sugar would not die, and will not die. If necessary, the community
>  will walk away from OLPC to start a new organization, and fork all of
>  the software. We would replicate git, Trac, lists, and Pootle, all of
>  which are under Free licenses. This has happened many times in the
>  FOSS development world. People at OLPC have been there and done that,
>  and in several cases gotten the t-shirt.

For what it is worth, I think Edward is overstating the likelihood
that a fork may be necessary in the future, and understating its
potential cost.  The process of porting Sugar to Windows would mostly
be made up of writing Windows implementations of relatively low level
libraries used by Sugar.  Many of these ports, like GTK, already exist
and are relatively mature.  And they're open source.  There is even an
extant project to port DBus to Windows already.

Forks are expensive and inefficient, and undertaken only when all else
fails.  I've read nothing to indicate that might be necessary in the
future.  Sugar will always be free software, even if it is sometimes
running on unfree software through a compatibility layer.

Given that this would make Sugar accessible to millions of children
around the world already using Windows, I can't see how this would be
a bad thing.  On the other hand, I can't see how either OLPC or
Microsoft has much motivation to invest in the port at this point.

--Tom