One of the areas Activity Central is trying to help Sugar Labs and OLPC is by pushing deployment working upstream. The core premis behind open source development is, "If the software is useful and the source code is freely available, users will adopt and improve it to meet their needs." We are seeing that happening as individual deployments are taking Sugar and OLPC software and modifying it to meet their individual deployment.
The second premise is, "If those improvement are pushed upstream they can be included in future versions of the software which benefits everyone." There is a cost to push work upstream. Most deployments have very limited resources and many immediate needs. As a result, the improvements don't receive the attention necessary to push them upstream. Keeping improvements local can provide a competitive advantage. If everyone else is pushing improvements upstream and one deployment keeps their 'special stuff' local that deployment can sell their special version to others. In economic this is called the free rider problem. Neither of these situations is unique to Sugar, OLPC, or educational software. An excellent parallel can be found in the embedded software market. 10 years ago many device manufacturers built their systems on open source software, but kept their work out of tree for one or both of the above reasons. Over time, most embedded system developers have pushed their work upstream. This happened gradually as system developers learned that it was more expensive to maintain their customizations locally then to work with upstream. The tipping point was often found as system developers tried to rebase their customization when upstream rebased. If you are a developer with out of tree patches (MStone comes to mind) or a deployment with local modifications please give us a shout or ping silbe on one of these list. We will try to work with you get your work in tree. david _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel