LCA2009: Sugar Labs tries to pick up the pieces

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 22 January 2009 07:30

Opinion and Analysis

It was created to sit on the laptops of the One Laptop Per Child project but after the numerous fiascos that the mother project faced, the Sugar learning system is now being developed entirely independently of OLPC.
Walter Bender, a former senior official of OLPC, one of the many who quit the project in disillusionment, has set up an organisation called Sugar Labs which develops the learning platform and also puts in on several hardware platforms to be sent out to various parts of the world.

The initial operating system that was loaded on the OLPC laptops was a modified version of Linux, created with the help of Red Hat. Sugar ran on top of this.

Later, when the OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte decided that the OLPC would also link up with Microsoft so that Windows could be loaded on the little laptop, Bender was among those who left.

He spoke about the Sugar learning platform at the Australian national Linux conference this morning, outlining some of the things it could do and his vision for an organisation - Sugar Labs - which at present has no money in the bank.

Sugar Labs is working with two Linux distributions - Fedora, Red Hat's community distribution, and Ubuntu - to put Sugar on an USB drive so that it can be used more easily.

Most of the Sugar code is released under the GPL version 2 with little bits being under GPLv3.