IMHO I not only agree 120%, but also OLE Bolivia has budgeted support for upstreaming development. The idea being, if we are going to benefit, as an institution/country/project from work done professionally, if we are going to depend on it and expect it keeps up with improvements, then we have a duty to feed it, upstream, regularly.
While an individual needs not be made responsible for that, I believe that any deployment above, say, 30-50 machines should consider helping fund development, at the local level especially, and have that development be made available to others. Deployments above the 1.000 units definitely can be counted as fair play when they have people on staff who are regularly connected with others worldwide in this effort. One of the uglier sides of piracy is that there is little sense of the duty to give back that has been built over the years. Hopefully we will get our project permitted to start sometime soon and we'll be able to contribute, as we have already benefited a lot from y'alls work. As Bernie says, there is a lot of skills out there, just waiting to be given a chance. Yama > I've been spending several months looking at problems > in the field, trying to fix some of them and, more importantly, trying > to build local capacity for fixing them autonomously. In my mind, this > is *the only* reasonable strategy to scale Sugar support up to the size > of an entire planet. Those who think it would be impossible for people > in developing nations to learn the technical skills needed for fixing > their software would be shocked to see what Nepal and Paraguay have been > able to achieve in just two years, with very little funding. > > _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
