Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 16:24, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: 2009/9/16 Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com: Let me rephrase again, to make things clear. I'd love to hear an official answer on this. Soon. Is the current SoaS going to be the primary way Sugar Labs distributes a Sugar-centric GNU/Linux distribution? Isn't there a wider question first? the one that asks if Sugar Labs is actually interested in being a distributor rather than just an upstream. I raised that question in my recent discussion and my feeling is that the responses basically said well we should really just focus on being an upstream since we already are overworked there, but actually Sugar Labs is just a platform where everyone interested in Sugar can get together and run Sugar-related projects Based on that, I'd say that SoaS is a fine project to sit under Sugar Labs but there shouldn't be a primary way of getting Sugar. Like other upstream projects, Sugar Labs should work with multiple downstreams (treating them equally) in order to achieve wide adoption of the software. That matches quite well my personal point of view. I'm just a bit concerned that the marketing team might need something like SoaS as part of their job to make Sugar widely known. But I'm just guessing here... That said, SoaS is very important for me as an upstream Sugar developer because before we had it, people had to install a linux distro or get an XO to try or test Sugar. So I have a big interest in that SoaS work continue forward, in SLs if needed. Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
I went to a talk at the Hauser Nonprofit Institute at Harvard yesterday. Someone asked a question the director, who teachers nonprofit administration, about why they choose the 5 areas they focused on. he said: Some people think the opposite of Strategic Management is bad management. Actually its Opportunistic Management. You want to manage your organization somewhere on the continuum between being completely opportunistic and completely strategic. Our strategic vision is strong. My version of it is: Sugar everywhere on everything for all kids in the world 5 to 12 years old. Free, Open and at the lowest Total Cost of Ownership possible. I love Sugar on a Stick as a promising way to do that. But my position as a Slobs candidate is that Sugar Labs has a lot of potential opportunity that seems to be right outside our door. I think we should be open to seeing what knocks when. I agree with Daniel's question. Sebastian, what is your theory of change here? What do you think we should do and why does doing it and doing it now as an official strategic decision get us closer to having all the world's children use Sugar? On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: 2009/9/16 Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org: 2009/9/16 Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com: Let me rephrase again, to make things clear. I'd love to hear an official answer on this. Soon. Is the current SoaS going to be the primary way Sugar Labs distributes a Sugar-centric GNU/Linux distribution? and to answer a question with a question: how does the answer to this affect your work? I can't immediately see its importance. Daniel ___ SLOBs mailing list sl...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/slobs -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 16:38, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) boche...@fedoraproject.org wrote: On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 16:24, Daniel Drake wrote: 2009/9/16 Sebastian Dziallas: Let me rephrase again, to make things clear. I'd love to hear an official answer on this. Soon. Is the current SoaS going to be the primary way Sugar Labs distributes a Sugar-centric GNU/Linux distribution? Isn't there a wider question first? the one that asks if Sugar Labs is actually interested in being a distributor rather than just an upstream. I raised that question in my recent discussion and my feeling is that the responses basically said well we should really just focus on being an upstream since we already are overworked there, but actually Sugar Labs is just a platform where everyone interested in Sugar can get together and run Sugar-related projects Based on that, I'd say that SoaS is a fine project to sit under Sugar Labs but there shouldn't be a primary way of getting Sugar. Like other upstream projects, Sugar Labs should work with multiple downstreams (treating them equally) in order to achieve wide adoption of the software. That's what I think as well. Sugar should be yet another DE in its relationship to distribution. That doesn't prevent SL to distribute some kind of a demo image (like Gnome does with Farsight Linux, for marketing purpose mainly), but the primary way of getting Sugar should be ask your OS-vendor IMHO. And no, I'm not saying that SoaS should be nothing more than a discardable demo. I see SoaS more as a downstream OS-vendor, distributing Sugar. That's a very interesting comparison, the discardable demo is of biggest use for Sugar upstream, but it's also true that it has tremendous value in real, end-user use of Sugar. Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 16:24, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: 2009/9/16 Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com: Let me rephrase again, to make things clear. I'd love to hear an official answer on this. Soon. Is the current SoaS going to be the primary way Sugar Labs distributes a Sugar-centric GNU/Linux distribution? Isn't there a wider question first? the one that asks if Sugar Labs is actually interested in being a distributor rather than just an upstream. I raised that question in my recent discussion and my feeling is that the responses basically said well we should really just focus on being an upstream since we already are overworked there, but actually Sugar Labs is just a platform where everyone interested in Sugar can get together and run Sugar-related projects Based on that, I'd say that SoaS is a fine project to sit under Sugar Labs but there shouldn't be a primary way of getting Sugar. Like other upstream projects, Sugar Labs should work with multiple downstreams (treating them equally) in order to achieve wide adoption of the software. That matches quite well my personal point of view. I'm just a bit concerned that the marketing team might need something like SoaS as part of their job to make Sugar widely known. But I'm just guessing here... I think its also vitally important to getting Sugar tried in a wide number of classrooms and schools. As far as educators are concerned we don't really have a product till its been used in a school for at least a year, and hopefully has official studies and data showing it improves performance. This will take years. Commercial products do that with millions of dollars of venture capital. We don't have that. We have you. We have ourselves and our community and the people out there in the world who believe in our mission if they choose to join us. Our goal is to work together to have Sugar be better then the commercial alternative, more cost effective for learning, and free as in freedom, and to have it stand up in a school board meeting on its pedagogical merits. That said, SoaS is very important for me as an upstream Sugar developer because before we had it, people had to install a linux distro or get an XO to try or test Sugar. So I have a big interest in that SoaS work continue forward, in SLs if needed. Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
Caroline Meeks wrote: [...] snip! I agree with Daniel's question. Sebastian, what is your theory of change here? What do you think we should do and why does doing it and doing it now as an official strategic decision get us closer to having all the world's children use Sugar? So well. I think I've explained my vision of SoaS already pretty well in the open letter. That was the long-term side of things. Now it comes to what I think is important in a project. And that is - also - certainty and trust. Those are pretty important factors. For developers, as well as for users, to know where one stands. I have asked for a reply on this question because it truly affects my work. I would like to know whether my work is needed in the way I'm doing it, whether it's appreciated, whether it's respected. Wait, how do you measure this? Well, I think I've been doing quite a big amount of the SoaS work over the last year. I've been told the Sugar community was about people doing stuff, so I considered myself to be leading the SoaS effort at some point. So far so good. But if I'm leading an effort, I'd prefer to be *informed* about what's happening. This starts with trademarking things (about which I haven't been informed), continues with the idea SL has of SoaS (just to be sure I don't waste my work) and ends with people using the name of the project I considered myself to be leading - without talking while planning it. So. This is not about avoiding competition. Or about having a dictatorship. Or whatever. It's about providing a bit of certainty. In my opinion, Sugar Labs has about four options how to act wrt SoaS. (1) SL decides the current SoaS to be *the* SoaS and enforces the brand. (Did you know that you're able to lose a trademark when not enforcing it?) Exceptions could be granted by a trademark committee. (2) SL decides to have more than one SoaS, basically allowing everybody to use the brand's name. (3) SL decides not to do a distribution of Sugar and doesn't care about the naming of other projects, allowing everybody to use the name. (4) SL decides not to do a distribution of Sugar and delegates this to *one* other project, probably in another project (Fedora, Ubuntu, TOS). Those are the possibilities I can think of right now. There are probably more. I would just like to know where I'm investing my work in, since I am just a volunteer. I don't get money for this. --Sebastian On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org mailto:d...@laptop.org wrote: 2009/9/16 Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org mailto:d...@laptop.org: 2009/9/16 Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com mailto:sebast...@when.com: Let me rephrase again, to make things clear. I'd love to hear an official answer on this. Soon. Is the current SoaS going to be the primary way Sugar Labs distributes a Sugar-centric GNU/Linux distribution? and to answer a question with a question: how does the answer to this affect your work? I can't immediately see its importance. Daniel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
SoaS is a game-changer. In a world where approximately 93% of desktops run a version of Windows, 5% run a version of Mac OSX, and GNU/Linux distros make up the remaining 1-2%, SoaS offers the possibility to boot on 90% of them and run in a VM in the other 10%. Not to mention reader devices neither Windows nor OSX will run on! OLPC has had a traditional weakness: because of the unavailabilty of machines, Sugar was not easy to demonstrate to curious educators, deciders, teachers, parents... and learners. (It could be said the missed opportunity with the G1G1s was an online collaborative space for trying Sugar - most G1G1 donors struggled with orphan XOs, an experience so different from Learners collaborating - most G1G1 donors never even experienced Sugar as it usually is used). Unfortunately, Sugar's availability for GNU/Linux distros doesn't solve that problem, because the installed base of distros remains too small and the barrier to installation too high. The distros are facing great difficulty in gaining marketshare on the desktop, for several reasons - ineffective marketing being one of them, but the distro vs. desktop choice being another. OEMs could tip the balance, but they are not motivated to, probably because the potential gain in margins is not worth upsetting Microsoft. The web could be a fabulously effective way to demo Sugar, and indeed I believe we should work towards that goal. It could even be possible to do more than demo, to execute cloud code. However, that cannot be a serious solution for schools. SoaS is both an effective demo of Sugar (and as such, an ally of OLPC), and the beginning of a solution for schools (the infrastructure around it - backup, documentation, support including a template for local IT support - needs lots of work still). But most of all, it offers a choice to schools to rethink how to use their hodgepodge of old and new mismatched computer hardware. The universality of SoaS places the emphasis squarely on the pedagogical aspects by reducing the impact of the technical barriers. So yes, from a marketing standpoint SoaS is vital. I don't see any other way of spreading Sugar use very widely, short of a huge OEM deal involving a distro (and today, the only likely candidate is Ubuntu which is standard on the Dell education netbook and is now an option on Intel Classmates worldwide). Now what? I think it is helpful to imagine a likely scenario in order to to think this through: A distro other than Fedora works on and creates a liveUSB version of Sugar. - Good, since it is possible more developers working on the technical challenges will find other and perhaps better ways of doing it. - Good, since a major distro just might be able to sign an OEM deal, particularly for the education market, and could market their liveUSB version in conjunction with the OEM (as well as provide valuable feedback through the OEM sales channel). - Good, because work on a new liveUSB distro could quite likely have positive effects upstream to Sugar proper (more bug hunters...) - Bad, from the point of view of making SoaS ultra-simple for the field. How will teachers and parents tell versions apart? The simplest way in my view is for the name Sugar on a Stick to refer only to the existing Fedora version. Of course, such a scenario raises other questions. If Fedora SoaS is the official version offered to parents and teachers, what happens if a different distro does a better job with a liveUSB implementation? The day a liveUSB version of Sugar contains a risk-free hard-drive installer (if such a thing is even possible) and close integration with the XS server, entire fleets of schools' machines can be flipped to Sugar. Should that better version become Sugar on a Stick? My answer is yes - because it is Sugar Labs building up the brand equity in Sugar on a Stick, and it is Sugar Labs that should have final say about what it is and what it means. But hold on a minute - should Sebastian working day and night be fairly compared to an engineering team another distro might make available? My answer to that would be, the fairest approach to Sebastian would be to somehow allocate resources to SoaS at least equivalent to those of a challenger. With that approach, perhaps SoaS would remain the best liveUSB version of Sugar. But - that implies Sebastian share responsibility for where SoaS is going. OK, all that said, today there isn't another implementation happening. And Fedora SoaS in my view is the highest-probablity-of-success vector to gain a huge portion of the education market for young learners. There is a fabulous potential to build connections between the worlds' disadvantaged children running XOs, and more fortunate children with access to a PC, netbook, Mac, whatever. No other education platform even exists with that potential. And Sugar being open and free as in freedom, its success will be geometric... when it happens beyond OLPC. I would like to see the *technical* roadmaps of
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
Hi Sebastian, In my opinion, Sugar Labs has about four options how to act wrt SoaS. (1) SL decides the current SoaS to be *the* SoaS and enforces the brand. (Did you know that you're able to lose a trademark when not enforcing it?) Exceptions could be granted by a trademark committee. I think you're going to get seven different answers from seven different SLOBs, but it's very reasonable to ask. Personally, I would go with (1), establishing that SoaS is a product of SL. I wouldn't make any future-exclusionary statements of the form SoaS is going to be the only way that SL distributes Sugar; it should be a positive statement about how SL feels about SoaS, rather than a negative statement about anyone else's current or future work. I don't think I'm ready to support actually filing a trademark application, because I think that costs at least a thousand dollars per registration per year that we don't have and could be better spent, and it doesn't really change much -- it seems that saying The SL policy on using the following terms is this as a social statement should be almost as effective as making the expensive legal statement for us. FWIW, - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
2009/9/16 Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com: Now it comes to what I think is important in a project. And that is - also - certainty and trust. Those are pretty important factors. For developers, as well as for users, to know where one stands. Personally i would just get on with it and let the code do the talking... Produce the best distribution that you can and people will use, respect and protect it. In the unlikely event that SL screws you over, take the project somewhere else, you'll still have your users because your work is high quality. And in the worst-case scenario you have to change the name, but everything else can stay, and you'll still achieving your goals - education. Daniel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [IAEP] SLOBs Position on SoaS
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: Personally i would just get on with it and let the code do the talking... Produce the best distribution that you can and people will use, respect and protect it. +1. Sebastian -- you have unending respect from both developers and (most importantly) the users. Even if the nitty-gritty of the SoaS/SL/Sugar/OLPC interaction is not always ideal, you are building something very concrete for the users. In practical terms, of course it is important that things are handled fairly, but in terms of worth (as in is this worth it), I'd suggest taking stock of the amazing impact of SoaS. Most OLPC fans I know are running SoaS, just yesterday I met a guy who saw me with the XO and mentioned he was been playing with SoaS, in a completel unrelated gathering. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
