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Negroponte Sees Sugar As OLPC's Biggest Mistake
griffjon writes "In an interview, Nicholas Negroponte claims that the biggest mistake OLPC made was the revolutionary Red Hat-based Sugar desktop environment — instead, he says, they should have built Sugar as an application that ran on a 'vanilla' Linux OS. Some disagree."
I don't want to be too negative, but the themes I have been reading in these forums and recent responses here make me almost compelled to write this. It seems clear that a large number of users on this site are either educational perfectionists or technical geeks with little understanding of how the real world works or how to manage people or lead any significant effort, group, team, or project in any meaningful way. At the first signs that your view of perfection will not occur, you bleed to death and go away. I guess that is to be expected that you will take your toys elsewhere and play by yourselves.
The reality is that Sugar, while fascinating in some respects, is poorly implemented at best and needs massive help that a handful of tinkerers on the side are not going to resolve soon. The only real negative to MS with a sugar app/UI is the cost impacts. It is one of several potential options. The goals of OLPC are education. Not software, not hardware â" both of those are only tools of which many are available. Anyway, after some thought about it, I highly doubt too much truly beneficial learning will be allowed in a number of the countries this is deployed to anyway. Kids will get the government approved ebooks on history or concepts of gov't, rules and law and on and on, which they will share among themselves since those governments will not allow open access to an unfiltered internet anyway, etc⦠So more might know what stars they are looking at or be better at math which is a start, but I highly doubt these 3rd world countries will suddenly become developed. Why? What 3rd world countries need most is democracy, free trade, personal & property rights.
You can all hate MS as much as you want, and I personally curse Bill at least once a week using office, but the fact that 95% of the 1st world uses it shows quite well that the software works quite fine (gee, if it didn't, the US & Europe, etc should be 3rd world countries by now from using MS? Get real).
Putting pragmatism into the equation will make things much more efficient for OLPC, and might actually get more than a handful of these into the world. 500K is not many when literally a billion are theoretically needed. How many posting here have any clue what it really takes to develop, test, build, distribute and support a billion devices? Basically I think a lot of folks on these forums need to grow up and stop whining. Perfection is a word in the dictionary, and in my experiences that is the only place you will ever find it. It does not exist in the real world. So, find a way to work as part of the solutions that emerge from the TEAM instead of being so stuck on your personal ideas of perfection that you bleed to death at the first sign that your ideas are not working out for the overall project. Make sure that sugar UI & apps turn out GREAT for education instead of the M$ way of being good enough, because you will wait forever by attempting any thoughts of perfection.
So "Niggerponte" is now suggesting that children should be given an operating system (Windows XP) that is functionally obsolete, by its manufacturers own insistence? If the limiting issue is the lack of a stable interface, then dump Sugar and use a stripped down Gnome or KDE. If the limiting issue is a bureaucratic insistence on running Windows, then I ask again, why is Sugar even an issue? Forgive me for being blunt, but the real closed mind idealism that appears to be holding this project back has nothing to do with whether the base OS is open source or not. It appears to be this bizarre focus on Sugar as the only possible interface. Dump Sugar, and the stabilizing and optimizing work on this machine could be done in months rather than years. Anyone with any real world experience in building software knows that anything with significantly complexity takes time to get right. Put Sugar on the back burner and do what it takes to get these machines into the hands of kids.
Niggerponte has lost all credibility. Why should we care what he says?