[sugar] Fwd: Roadmap update

[David Farning]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 8:20 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Riccardo Lucchese
> <riccardo.lucchese at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> That is `zero olpc contractors working full time on Sugar' ?
>
> Sorry about the lack of clarity, I somehow assumed everyone knew about this
> already. I'm basically just reporting what has been said during the OLPC
> roadmap talk at Sugarcamp. OLPC, and hence all it's employees and
> contractors, are going to focus on the following areas:
>
> "Rebasing on F10, power management, localization/translation,
> activation/lease/signing/management, Linux application support"
>
> As you can see there is no real Sugar work there.
>
> Now, that does *not* mean OLPC is ditching Sugar. As far as I know it will
> continue to be shipped as default/main product in all the deployments.
>

This ends up being an excellent division of responsibility.  OLPC can
focus their resources more heavily on specific deployment issues.
Sugar Labs can take a more innovative and upstream footing.

In any organization there is an on going struggle between supporting
existing customers and developing new technology.  If we look at the
relationships between successful Linux distributions and their
upstream communities, we see that in each case, the distribution
focuses on customer specific issues and critical paths while the
upstream community focus on innovative and development issues.

Anyone care to estimate the value of the 10,000 plus packages that the
community maintains in Fedora?  On the other hand, who in their right
mind would base their Fortune 100 IT infrastructure on Linux if it
were not for the support guarantees the Red Hats of the world provide.

Over all, this is a good thing!

thanks
david