[Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model

[david at lang.hm]

On Wed, 7 May 2008, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:

> On Tue, 6 May 2008, david at lang.hm wrote:
>
>> ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version of each 
>> of those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these seperate 
>> packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then do a lot 
>> of testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the result.
>> 
>> unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be against the 
>> idea of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the resulting 
>> work to get anything running will hurt this model.
>
> Again: what makes Sugar different from Linux?
>
> The ability to interact *everywhere*, and to share *every activity* by 
> default.  That interactivity basically defines what an activity *is*.
>
> Yes, this severely restricts the amount of software that can run on Sugar. 
> But again: the whole world of FLOSS educational software can run on Linux 
> just fine.
>
> If we're just (badly) reinventing a new WM, what's the point?

which is why I fail to see the big point of Sugar.

you don't have to scrap everything to write activities that can be shared 
easily.

a perfect example was the suggeation to make the sugarized activities use 
a standard file picker call so that it could go to the journal on the XO 
machine, or to a normal file selecteor window on other desktops. doing 
this would also meant that other 'well behaved' software that used that 
call to the window manager would suddenly just start working right on 
sugar without requiring modification.

unfortunantly the concept was greeted with a reaction similar to yours 
(i.e. 'NO, we don't want to run the risk of people using the apps on a 
normal desktop, we need to lock them into using sugar')

David Lang