[Etoys] What now ?

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 10.01.2009, at 14:18, Karl Ramberg wrote:

> Hi,
> hearing the news that much of the Sugar dev team is fired I now wonder
> if there is any point in working on Sugar integration anymore. I have
> started on a JournalMorph where one could obtain pictures and sounds
> etc. from the Journal to link in or import into a project, but now I
> have slight doubts about if there is any use for such a thing ?
> Do you guys have any thoughts on the future ?


OLPC is *not* abandoning Sugar. On the contrary, Sugar is becoming  
available not only on the XO but on more Linux distributions, too.

For the time being of course the more than 500 thousand kids (soon to  
be a million) are more than enough motivation. Etoys is one of the  
more versatile activities available to them. Great journal access  
would make it quite a bit more useful.

There was an OLPC developers meeting yesterday, and the plan of action  
is to not do a full operating system release anymore (which is hardly  
possible with two engineers left), but instead ship regular Fedora  
Linux. Sugar is already available in Fedora as a UI option, and it  
would be made default on a particular Fedora "spin". IIUC countries  
can choose what system to have pre-installed on their machines and  
this "Fedora-Sugar" system would be the choice recommended by OLPC.

The Etoys rpms are on their way into Fedora thanks to Gavin so I don't  
see reason to despair :) If any it's going to be an exciting year for  
Etoys, there is a great announcement imminent.

- Bert -