The recent layoffs of almost the entire OLPC software development team have been widely circulated, but not the implications for Sugar, the learning platform originally developed specifically for the OLPC XO but now available on various GNU/Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.
Here's where the Sugar project stands:
- Sugar's development infrastructure is now mostly independent of OLPC, thanks to many generous partners (Ivan Krstic, OSU Open Source Lab, Free Software Foundation, prgmr.com, MIT Media Lab, Solution Grove, Collabora and Develer).
- For about 3 months now, Sugar Labs has already been taking care of Sugar development with almost no support from OLPC (other than contracting the core development team until recently).
- Sugar has not lost any of its full-time core developers as a consequence of OLPC's layoffs: All of the core team will stay around as unpaid volunteers while we're looking for new ways to finance their full-time contribution.
- Today, development of Sugar and activities relies upon 20 active contributors.
- Over the past few months, we have grown our community with new contributors, new partners and new distributors.
- The rate of development seems to be increasing steadily as we consolidate our new community driven development model (we can obtain some support evidence from git).
- Through the Software Freedom Conservancy, Sugar Labs is receiving some very generous support (although we're not yet able to credit individual donors).
- While we do not plan to hire a development team within Sugar Labs, we're working to get some of our full-time volunteer contributors sponsored by external organizations.
- Red Hat and Solution Grove are contributing with engineering resources and covering traveling expenses for some of our members.
- The development cycle is proceeding steadily and Sucrose 0.84 will be released as planned in March.
- We've been working to establish Local Labs, grassroots organizations which, in our mind, will fill up the gap left by OLPC in deployments.
It's starting to become clear that 0.84 is where we'll prove our credibility as a self-sufficient, community-driven project. See our Getting Involved page!
Submitted by the Sugar Labs marketing team
Wow some positive news.
Wish I could be of some help, but I am not any good at the things that help is needed for.
Would still like to here from someone at OLPC, letting us know what is happening about O/S and deployments? (or have I missed it?)
Robert G
I wish you all the most success possible.
Wish I could help, but my Python programming ability is about first-year-undergraduate level right now.
We could use a lot of help just testing. We're getting a new release of Sugar ready, and it should run on many Linux distributions. Sign up to the sugar-devel mailing list, and ask how you can help testing Sugar on your favourite distro.
Also, for those just getting into Python, there are many activities on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/All which are out of date, and not maintained, but can be improved with a bit of time and a bit of Python. Again, just ask how you can help and we'll help you help us.
The core team has all the skills, but really no time for the "low hanging fruit". The best use of our time is really mentoring others to step up and get involved in the coding, to build our team and community.
hmmm...apparently i'm more behind in the olpc world than i realized
what is surcose? i clicked on the link...looks like a new version of sugar...is that what it is?
This somewhat outdated page explains the components of Sugar:
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy