[sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship

[david at lang.hm]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Walter Bender wrote:

>> Sugar/Linux could easily have compatibility with regular Linux stuff,
>> but this has been denied despite strong demand.
>
> Albert, saying that this has been "denied" is overstated. Was it a
> priority in the beginning? No. Were some decisions made that make it
> more difficult? Yes. But are people working towards this goal? Yes.

I'll say that the impression that I have received as an outsider is that 
the people working on Sugar have not at all been interested in 
compatibility with normal linux software.

in fact there was a post within the last week claiming that it would be a 
bad idea to make sugar able to use unmodified linux software becouse that 
would mean that the educational software and activities being written for 
sugar could then be used on any linux box without sugar and this would 
mean the death of sugar. a couple of us responded that if sugar requires 
that sort of lock-in it deserved to die, but I don't remember anyone 
speaking up to say that the developers of sugar or the software team at 
OLPC disagreed with the initial poster.

I know that in an ideal world you would not have to speak up to deny each 
and every crazy statement that's made, but at this point there is so much 
uncertinty about what the attitudes really are (not to mention the problem 
of knowing who actually speaks with authority on many of these things) the 
reality is that everything that's incorrect needs to be responded, if only 
so others don't start quoting it incorrectly.

David Lang