Negroponte says OLPC is 'scaling up' Sugar kids' software platform

Taking a page out of Microsoft Corp.'s book, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) now wants to get its much-praised Sugar graphical interface created for its XO children's laptop onto as many PCs as possible, whether they are running the free Linux operating system or Windows.

"Yes, OLPC's commitment to Sugar has changed. It is now larger, not smaller," wrote OLPC chairman and founder Nicholas Negroponte in a public posting on Wednesday at the OLPC's community forum. "We are scaling Sugar up, not down."

Contrary to reports that implied that the OLPC was focusing its efforts on selling its $200 laptop to governments by any means necessary, including surrendering to Windows XP, Negroponte says the educational non-profit actually plans to redouble its software efforts, especially to fix and port its much-praised, home-grown Sugar software.

"Sugar is a very good idea, less than perfectly executed. I attribute our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices," wrote Negroponte in a message addressed to OLPC volunteers and supporters.

Sugar is a graphical desktop built by OLPC engineers to run on the XO's specially-stripped down version of Red Hat Linux. It was developed to support an educational theory called 'constructionism', which advocates an experiential, active style of learning for students, that was co-created by one of the OLPC's co-founders, Seymour Papert.

Negroponte says he still believes that "the best educational tool is constructionism and the best software development method is Open Source. In some cases those are best achieved like the Trojan Horse, versus direct confrontation or isolating ourselves with perfection."

Thus, the first priority is to re-architect Sugar so that it is separate from the XO hardware and thus can be ported and licensed to other machines.

Sugar "needs to be a fried egg, with distinct yoke and white, rather than having the UI, collaborative tools, power management and radios merge into one amorphous blob," he wrote. "Otherwise, it is impossible to debug and will be limited to the small, albeit growing, world of the XO hardware platform."

While about half a million XOs have been ordered or shipped to schools and consumers, more than a million Asus Eees, another low-cost, compact laptop, have been sold. The Eee was initially sold only with Linux but now comes in an XP version, too.

Moreover, there are tens or hundreds of millions of conventional Windows PCs already in place in schools in developed countries, which the OLPC is starting to target.

"For this reason, Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms and to run under Windows," Negroponte continued. "We have been engaged in discussions with Microsoft for several months, to explore a dual boot version of the XO. Some of you have seen what Microsoft developed on their own for the XO. It works well and now needs Sugar on top of it (so to speak)."

To achieve its broader goal, the OLPC, which recently reorganized and lost several key executives as a result, also "needs to be more business-like: meet schedules, manage expectations and fulfill promises," Negroponte wrote. "To do that, we need to hire more developers, work more together and spend less time arguing."

Negroponte also exhorted OLPC volunteers to be less rigidly idealistic.

"Remember the expression: perfection is the enemy of good. We need to reach the most children possible and leverage them as the agents of change," he wrote. "As we reach out to engage a wider community, some purism has to morph into pragmatism. To suggest that this forsakes Open Source or redirects our mission is absurd."