Hi Scott, Thanks for the proposal, lots of combustible material here. :)
I wouldn't be very excited about just porting Sugar activities to a stock Android base. I think our goals for Sugar are mainly to build educational software that: * can be appropriated -- translated, modified, discussed. * encourages creation rather than mere consumption of content. * encourages joint collaboration and sharing. I don't think stock Android apps can do these things well, so I don't think we're advancing our goals by creating stock Android apps. Of course, you can still have a good educational experience on Android that *doesn't* meet our goals, but I'm assuming we're willing to let other people work on that; it's not what we consider Sugar to be about. (I'm not disagreeing with your perception of where Sugar is now, just arguing that a new proposal should still be able to meet our goals.) So, we'd have to be modifying the Android base OS, as you suggest. I think this idea would make much more sense for OLPC than for Sugar Labs -- it's fine for OLPC to go hacking around in Android and create a code editor, and Journal and Collaboration services and so on, but it would be really hard to get anyone on a non-XO to be able to run them because Android is so fragmented. Each hardware vendor has their own Android build (which they aren't obliged to provide source for!), and most vendors ship devices root-locked to most users. How would Sugar Labs be proposing that owners of Android devices actually *run* our patched Android OS, if we don't even have the vendor's source to patch? Have you got any ideas on the above? Again, I'm not disagreeing that someone *could* make a Sugar-like environment by modifying Android, just that it doesn't seem like Sugar Labs is the right group to be interested in doing that, because it would be so hard to actually ship the result without control over a hardware platform. SL would go from producing software that can run on most machines to producing software that needs to be hand-tailored for each device.. How about ChromeOS instead, then? Rumor is it was too slow to get going, and is either going to be canceled or just merged with Android: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/14/gmail-creator-paul-buchheit-chrome-os-will-perish-or-merge-with-android/ Of course, I don't actually believe everything I read on TechCrunch, but the fact that it's an immature and unproven platform is undeniable; SL shouldn't bet the farm on it as a platform yet, surely. Thanks! - Chris. -- Chris Ball <[email protected]> One Laptop Per Child _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
