Peru has ordered over 260,000 OLPC XO-1 laptops. These machines will be running Sugar on GNU/Linux. Forty thousand of these are already in warehouses in Peru, with Sugar builds 656 or 703 installed. It's hard to avoid disappointment when OLPC will not commit to this platform for all future deployments, but let's concentrate on the present: over a quarter of a million kids will use Sugar/GNU/Linux. You can directly influence their lives! Your software, documentation, support expertise, ideas and insights can improve the education of a vast number of kids. Many of you already are Peruvian Folk Heroes. We need even more.
I'm not trying to convince you that you need to pledge loyalty to OLPC and not question its decisions. In fact, we need more non-affiliated developers and community, and more third-party infrastructure. You don't have to agree with OLPC's press releases: OLPC seems intent on making its own mistakes, but someone needs to keep doing the work that will help the kids regardless. But why invest in third-party infrastructure when we could just be reusing OLPC's lists/servers/builds? Because, in fact, OLPC is badly resource-starved, and (believe it or not) doesn't actually have good infrastructure to build on. Even though OLPC is growing its software team, it takes time to hire good people, and it will take more time for them to settle in and be productive. In the meantime, the external mailing lists, code trees, build and test infrastructure, generated API documentation, etc you create will help the core team as well. If you set up a healthy external development community for Sugar/GNU/Linux, your work will directly benefit the folks who sit at 1 Cambridge Center and (despite recent distractions) try to write code to change the world. Please continue to rail and rally to get OLPC's leadership back on track. But don't let it distract you from the real task, or dissuade you from pitching in: there are a quarter of a million Peruvian kids who need your code, documentation, support and ideas. Few people have ever had the opportunity to make such a difference to so many. -- scott p.s. In the next two emails, I'll suggest (a) a mechanism for spinning of 3rd party development and merging back contributions upstream, and (b) a list of interesting projects you might tackle. -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
