OLPC software efforts have been, from Day 1, a community effort. The
extent to which the community has risen to the occasion at every
level—from firmware to application and content development—is an
inspiration. As we approach our final series of trial software
releases this summer and our first release this fall, it is
appropriate to reflect on what we have achieved and where we are
heading.
Starting with firmware, the transition to Open Firmware, led by Mitch
Bradley, has given us a powerful, simple, and robust platform upon
which to build a stable and open system. Most of the core
functionality is present (and debugged). The recent refactoring of the
communications protocols used to communicate with our Embedded
Controller (EC) better positions us—over time—to rewrite the entirety
of the EC code in an open and more streamlined fashion and release it
as free software. The efforts of Marvell and Cozybit have brought us
to the point where all the core mesh functionality now works. Efforts
to track (and help steer) the emerging 802.11s standard continue; and
movement towards a free and open software stack to run on the mesh
co-processor proceed. We are firmly committed to software freedom and
anticipate—as the mesh and EC code become open—offering free software
to run all the subcomponents in our machine.
At the kernel level, through combined efforts of the OLPC team, Red
Hat, AMD, and the Linux community, we continue to track the kernel
mainline and contribute upstream all of our improvements and bug
fixes. At several places we have diverged—perhaps the most
controversial being our choice of VServer as an interim container
virtualization solution—but for the most part we have succeeded in
leveraging the work of the broader community and keeping our
differences to a minimum.
Our choice of Fedora—we are almost transitioned to the newly-released
Fedora Core 7—as our distribution has also contributed to controversy
within the Linux community. There are any number of small-footprint
distributions that may well have served our purposes, but Fedora met
and continues to meet our needs; and the dedication of the Red Hat
team at every level has been extraordinary. Without the likes of
Marcelo Tosatti and David Woodhouse, we would be far short of our
goals. Red Hat shares our uncompromising dedication to free and
open-source solutions and continues to go the extra mile to ensure
that neither quality or principles are sacrificed.
The user experience through the Sugar interface puts us within reach
of many of our goals: simplicity without compromised functionality;
discoverability and usability; security and robustness; transparency
through layered exploration; and, perhaps most important, support for
a learning environment that is both expressive and collaborative. The
UI team, led on the design side by Pentagram and OLPC's Eben Eliason
and on the software side by Red Hat's Marco Gritti (Bryan Clark and
Seth Nickell contributed to some of the early foundational design
work), has created a framework that offers powerful simplicity without
limiting the richness of interaction that children can have with each
other and their teachers.
As we expand upon the work of Dan Williams and the Collabora team, we
will see more Activities that run across multiple laptops, which
enable a new level of collaboration for individual and group projects.
Many of these features are built directly into Activities such as
Etoys, but a common framework and API is key to making collaboration a
system-wide feature. The Presence Service, which governs how children
represent and find each other on the network, is essentially complete.
Our next software release will include scalable mechanisms for shared
activities using Tubes as a data transport, both peer-to-peer within
the mesh and within the context of a server.
The preceding paragraphs enumerate much of the phenomenal progress
that we have made as we prepare to ship our Generation-1 laptops.
While we were told repeatedly that many of the problems we faced were
unsolvable; we find ourselves vindicated and empowered by the combined
efforts of our community, partners, and in-house engineers, who have
found solutions to these unsolvable problems.
It is important now to set expectations for the software that ships on
the XOs in September. The tremendous amount of work to date does not
change the fact that our first-release software is very much a work in
progress. The software at ship time will not have all the richness of
the Mesh view as described in our User Interface Guide, but we are on
track to have an extensible framework in place. The Journal, another
important component of Sugar, recently appeared in our builds and
currently offers bare-bones functionality; however, the first
iteration of the data store is near completion and includes support
for removable media and network file systems. The Journal is on track
to include more features, such as a rich system to tag, search, and
