[sugar] Congratulations! but Sugar sucks

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

I think that one useful thing that we could work out in this thread would be
how many dollars and months it would take to get each of these areas from
suckage to ruleage. Here's some estimates out of my ... head:

1. datastore. Get consensus: 1.5 months from now (really, 1 month from 8.2).
Hire/reassignAndClearTheDecksOf someone to work on this full time: 1 month.
Actual work to reach The Next Level: 2-3 months. Cleanup: 2-3 months.
Realistically, we can't guarantee that this can make it by 9.1, but it
should be close. Time: 6+ months, cost: 4-6 months FTE. Someone with these
skills could cost up to $80K/yr in US, over half that internationally.

2. OS updates. Design and consensus: 2.5 months from now. Actual coding: 2
months. (This is the kind of problem that needs good clean design, but is
not too very hard to implement.) Time: 5 months, cost: using existing
resources.

3. File Sharing. Apparently there is already an intern on this. 3 months,
existing resources.

4. Activity Modification: 2 months and <<$5K.

5. Bitfrost
Blocked by 4 (activity bundle signatures), above. After that, there are
about 2 biggish (1-2 months) features to add, and then the rest is eternal
vigilance (much debugging). Say 2-4 months FTE, 6 months ETA

6. Power management
???

7. Software: if you build it, they will come.

8. Collab:
??? existing resources?

9. Mesh:
???

Add it all up, and I think that with about 3 expensive new-hire FTEs and me
(much, much cheaper), 90% of this list could be done in time for 9.1; the
other 10% could be done by 9.2 without even using the new FTEs, which would
free them up for nextgen development. On the other hand, I think that with
just existing resources, only about 30% will be done by 9.1, which will
Still Suck.

IMO this is a steal - I know nothing about funding here, but if there is a
chance of this level of funding I think it is a no-brainer. Say there's
$100,000,000 of hardware out there, shipped; I think that this list accounts
for easily 10% of the use-value of this hardware; and the costs above are
far under $300K, with the most pessimistic accounting. That means that the
*immediate* social-value for investment would be around a factor of 20.
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