For me, Sugar on a Stick (or on a liveCD, or in virtualization, or as a session) is about a "Sugar" experience, not a "Sugar on an underlying distro/meta-OS/hardware" experience. No disrespect to the massive effort that goes into packaging and adapting Sugar to a distro (and I am certainly aware that there are differences), but teachers and Learners will and should care mostly about connecting to classmates, Activities, and the Journal; the distro should be secondary, as the hardware should be secondary. The cause of Sugar is advanced by its openness to many platforms; that agnosticism is a key tenet of Sugar Labs in my view. I don't think "Sugar on a Stick" should "belong" to any one distro, let me explain why (and how some of us can consider the name to mean different things too).
Let's look at this another way. The most optimistic desktop marketshare estimates for all GNU/Linux distros combined is: under 2%. I'm not really worried about Sugar running on all distros, hitting that 2% (although I do often wonder why they are not more proactive in their support); I look at Apple's 7% to 10%, but especially Microsoft's 90%. I want to cut deep into that 90%, and in a context where preinstallation is not yet happening (although it will), Sugar on a Stick is the best way to sidestep the Windows barrier. We are positioning ourselves as the very best K-6 learning system, at *any* price, and many of our differentiators are due to our FOSS basis - Microsoft is out for the count in a quality comparison, and out for the count in a cost comparison too. This is an incredible opportunity for distros to get onto netbooks and into schools, and I wonder what they are waiting for. It's no accident that Ubuntu is the standard default OS of the Dell education netbook, and has just been added as a standard alternate OS on the Classmate; somebody over there is going for that opportunity. Microsoft's marketing position by the way is limited to "we have thousands of applications and run on any PC", an argument worn thin by their inability to run on small-footprint systems, which is why they are desperately trying to abolish the word "netbook". A note about wording. Extreme care goes into our press releases to make them intelligible to teachers and educators (and funders), while framing debates and remaining concise. I use acronyms like "SoaS" and "ASLO" in e-mails to save time and get work done, but always talk about "Sugar on a Stick" in marketing materials, and not the distro or "Linux" for the reasons cited above. The journalists and bloggers who know us look right past the PR and marketing and look at our wiki, talk to contributors, maybe even lurk during debates like this one; if they are fair, they will paint a true picture, warts and all (though more growing pains than warts I'd say :-). It's that huge mass of other journalists, who don't follow FOSS, or even tech, but who *are* interested in education issues, who can be reached by our PR and marketing, and who hopefully can learn that there are other ways of using computers to aid in children's education. At the risk of repeating myself, the incredible complexity of the engineering going on around Sugar means we are saddled with arcane and obscure numbering systems. SoaS-1 (F9/v0.84) is not SoaS-2 (F11/v0.84), neither one is OLPC-OS v8.2 (F9/v0.82). I proposed simplifying this for teachers by going to an instantly understandable "beta-1" and "v1" with Sugar on a Stick, and I became temporarily upset with Sebastian recently when he moved up the v1 release date three months without consulting anyone; Caroline identified the crux of that debate as being differing interpretations of what "Sugar on a Stick" means - for Sebastian, it is code and hacks running Sugar v0.84 over Fedora; for Caroline and myself, it is a classroom solution we want teachers to depend on which includes a reliable USB stick loader, documentation, a blueprint for local support, lots more testing of a hardware compatibility matrix, Mac compatibility, etc. After discussion and lots of reflection and a stroke of marketing genius from Tomeu, we found a way out of the impasse: to "baptize" the v1 version (and indeed subsequent versions) as flavors, starting with Strawberry. We even placed a strawberry logo (#06) into the boot animation sequence; unsophisticated users will be able to tell us the version from the boot logo color. Hiding unnecessary complexity from end users is excellent marketing; if I say iPod, we could all sketch one, even if Apple is on their 150th iPod SKU; we associate "iPod" with "portable gadget for listening to music on headphones, and maybe watching videos too". For teachers, parents, and Learners, "Sugar on a Stick" should mean "any USB stick loaded with the Sugar Learning Platform that can restart a computer directly into the Sugar interface"... no more, no less. If we need to call it something else internally (which I am sure is the case with other distros on board), that's fine. The Marketing team has meetings every Tuesday at 1500 UTC, it's a good place to speak up about what we are calling things, especially to prospective testers of Sugar. thanks Sean On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 9:15 PM, David Van Assche<dvanass...@gmail.com> wrote: > Well, that ship sailed quite a while ago. I find it hard to believe > that you missed the significant publicity surrounding Sugar being > available on openSUSE in ALL formats (cd/dvd/usb/vm appliance) as I've > been touting that for at least 2 months now. In fact the collaboration > sessions that have been advertised various times quite explicitly talk > about the opensuse variant, which contains a large set of honey apps > (thats what makes it different from Fedora SoaS) > > To me, saying stick = Fedora, is like saying Sugar is based solely on > Fedora... which is just totally silly and very harmful for the > distribution of it. Fedora is a very small community in comparison to > the debian based world (which is approximately 60% of the market) then > we also have Mandriva and openSUSE who take another good 25%+ of the > market, conservatively. That leaves Fedora + derivatives with 15% of > the market... (based on distrowatch figures) thats highly undemocratic > to steal the term SoaS to just refer to Fedora (especially since the > term actually came from someone who stuck Sugar on usb via Ubuntu) I > can dig up the references for you guys if you like. > > How can Sugar on a Stick (not the term Fedora quite obviously missing > from it) be Fedora centric? > > This smells to me like saying Office = microsoft... it smells very > bad... which is why I'm raising my concerns over it somewhat... > > David > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Bert Freudenberg<b...@freudenbergs.de> wrote: >> On 18.06.2009, at 20:28, David Van Assche wrote: >> >>> Soas = sugar on a stick.... whether that be on Fedora, Suse, debian, >>> or mandriva... they are all the same thing, and I would argue SoaS is >>> NOT a distro... just a dsitribution mechanism... for example, I call >>> my opensuse based sugar on stick SoaS too, as that is technically what >>> it is... >> >> You can call that whatever you want, but please not in public. SoaS >> means a very specific distro, not just any Linux+Sugar slapped onto a >> USB flash drive. >> >>> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Sean DALY<sdaly...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> I beg everyone's pardon, I was under the impression that SoaS is >>>> Fedora-specific... are there plans to do versions based on other >>>> distros? >> >> No, there are no such plans currently. >> >> IMHO we should not water down the meaning of "SoaS". >> >> - Bert - >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Sugar-devel mailing list >> Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org >> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel >> > _______________________________________________ > Marketing mailing list > market...@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing > _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel