I would suggest that you don't really understand the reason for supporting open source. No software running on top of XP, for example, will free of the pressures form MS to do what they want you to do. And what they want you to do may have nothing to do with the desires of teachers and students across the world.
Currently, any software problems that occur in the f 7 base for sugar can be dealt with by altering code that developers have access to. That openness will not come from MS. If there is a problem with the underlying operating system fixing the problem will depend on MS largess which up to now has been minimal. -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: devel-list <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Walter leaving and shift to XP. Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:28:46 -0700 The OLPC Association has done amazing things with limited resources and deserves to take great pride in this. However, this Negroponte quotation from the article seems correct to me: He lamented that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the XOs, saying Sugar "grew amorphously" and "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way." For instance, the laptops do not support Flash animation, widely used on the Web. "There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist." You have to prioritize your goals when they conflict. The question to consider -- is it really the case that having a 100% pure open source platform is more important IN THE SHORT TERM than making a type of content available that is ubiquitous as a format for delivering educational content. Gnash is simply not an equivalent product to the Adobe player IN THE SHORT TERM and it would have been a pragmatic choice to work hard to get Adobe to permit their flash player to be shipped with the XO. By making these tradeoffs of upholding purity of open source when teachers and school/ed ministry people obviously prioritize the content ahead of the purity of the implementation, one ends up in a place where time is short and an MS port may be catching up. Of course the target audience will prefer the solution on which they can deliver the content they want. Essentially the attempt at total purity may result in a much worse outcome with respect to the open source goal. Recriminations against Negroponte are less productive than learning from the consequences of trying to achieve an overly ambitious constellation of conflicting goals. Instead reach the goals in priority order through realistic, explicit, predictable and explainable phasing, as now seems to be the plan. Certainly, if Walter manages to get funding for a project to expand sugar for other platforms it will assist in reaching the final target. More resources will be available to attack the problems posed by adopting an entirely new user interface such as sugar, while being asked to deliver applications and content that are the most understandable part of the OLPC package to the adopters.. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- ======================================================================= You can always tell the people that are forging the new frontier. They're the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs. ======================================================================= Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
