First of all, just to clear, Flash does run on the laptop: there is a choice of both the Adobe Flash player and the FOSS Flash player, Gnash. We opted to install the Gnash player by default. Many of the problems people have with Flash are actually related to codecs rather than the player itself. We don't load proprietary codecs onto the machine by default, but they are available for download and some of our deployments in fact do opt to load some proprietary codecs--after of course obtaining the proper licenses. I see this approach as a reasonable compromise given the goals of the project. Apparently others see this as fundamentalism?
Second, regarding Microsoft, I agree that if it is to be an open platform, it should be open to everyone, including Microsoft. That said, it is somewhat revisionist to suggest that the SD card was added on behalf of Microsoft: it was added at the same time as the camera because we had the opportunity while adding an ASIC necessary to improve NAND Flash performance. The fact that it facilitates the running of Windows was not the consideration at the time. I am not aware of any current effort to port Sugar to Windows; I don't know enough about Windows to know how much effort that would entail or even if it is possible. Third, in regard to the performance, feature sets, etc., the OLPC software stack is immature--quite naturally, as it is a relatively new product and project. The software development roadmap for the project had included a phased approach where we first get a core feature set built; do some initial triage of bugs and bring some stability to the deployments; and then work to fine-tune performance. While have heard a lot of noise about performance in the media and from some members of the development community, it has not, in my experience been a major road-block in the school trials and deployments. There are lots of bugs and lots of things that could be improved upon, and these should certainly be addressed, but the characterizations being made in this thread do not reflect the realities of the OLPC deployments--the children and teachers are using the laptops and are learning. Fourth and final point for the moment: it is important to make a distinction between the system software--drivers, power management, memory management, etc. and the Sugar user experience. It is not yet easy to always draw a clear line between them, but many of the performance problems* are not related to the choices we made regarding the UI, although, since the UI is how one experiences the laptop, they are felt there. I am not suggesting that there isn't room for improvement, but the call for dropping Sugar is not going to make as dramatic a difference in performance as is being suggested. And at what cost? Is the goal is simply to get laptops into the hands of as many children as possible? If that is the case, why have we been bothering to develop any software at all? And if others are making low cost laptops that run Windows, why don't those efforts fulfill that goal? -walter * Ironically, the majority of the system-level problems we had experienced are directly tied to the two proprietary code bases on the laptop: the wireless firmware and the embedded controller firmware. While there are efforts to replace these, OLPC itself has been diligently working with both Marvell and Quanta to make the best of the situation. To suggest that fundamentalism has impeded progress on those two subsystems is not correct. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel