Re: [Gnash-dev] Re: OLPC 767 Gnash 0.8.3 + Flash developer perspective

[John Watlington]

On Oct 7, 2008, at 11:20 AM, John Watlington wrote:

> If you contribute work on Sugar, you are really contributing to  
> SugarLabs,
> not OLPC.   It is difficult to tell the difference, because many of  
> the people
> working full-time on Sugar are OLPC employees or contractors, but
> Sugar runs on laptops other than the OLPC XO.
> Thus this question should probably be asked on the SugarLabs  
> mailing list.
> (BTW, SugarLabs are also the people to ask "why not support MP3 ?")
>
> For the record, OLPC has not "decided to throw away the majority of
> that work out the window".   This year we will ship Sugar on over
> 98.5% of laptops built.   We continue to invest most of our resources
> into development of Sugar.    We will not ship laptops which are
> not natively capable of booting Sugar, and have paid to have Open
> Firmware extended to allow this (the only resource investment related
> to supporting Windows.)
>
> OLPC can't stop a deployment from installing Windows on our laptops.
> And due to the fact that the "giant software stack" doesn't really
> run "cleanly and quickly", some seem to be considering it.
> In some countries, the ability to run Windows is written into the
> tender for laptops -- even if the laptops will be delivered with Sugar
> and likely will never run Sugar.
s/Sugar/Windows/ in that last line.

> Do you only buy laptops/desktops for which the manufacturer has
> refused to support Windows ?
>
> wad
>
> On Oct 7, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Bastiaan Jacques wrote:
>
> > I have to ask this question, although I should note that I'm an  
> > outsider.
> >
> > Why should we contribute to OLPC when OLPC has already agreed to  
> > using
> > Microsoft's software and apparently has no (moral) objections to  
> > using
> > Adobe's software?
> >
> > To me (again, as an outsider) it seems to me that OLPC has  
> > generated a
> > *huge* free software development momentum, and a massive amount of  
> > work
> > was completed in order to let a giant software stack run cleanly and
> > quickly on the OLPC. Now OLPC has decided to throw the majority of  
> > that
> > work out of the window (pun not intended) in favour of a proprietary
> > solution from a vendor that has apparently discovered a new part of
> > the world to enslave.
> >
> > To me, it seems like whatever work might be done to get Gnash working
> > nicely on the OLPC is going to be thrown away almost as soon as it
> > might potentially be finished. So, I ask, why contribute?
> >
> > Bastiaan
> >
> > On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Carlos Nazareno wrote:
> >
> > > Wonderful! Glad to have gotten in touch with you guys. Hope to
> > > coordinate with you guys more. And please, if any of you are
> > > interested in OLPC dev, please do participate and maybe help with
> > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Gnash and
> > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Flash_Gamedev.