Former One Laptop Per Child
President of software and content Walter Bender has launched Sugar
Labs, an organization that will promote the development of the open-source
user interface originally developed for the XO laptop.

Sugar Labs Foundation will refine the development of Sugar, a UI (user interface)
for the Linux OS that provides educational tools for kids. The foundation aims
to create distributions of Sugar for multiple hardware and open-source platforms
beyond the XO laptop.

"By being independent of any specific hardware platform and by remaining
dedicated to the principles of free and open-source software, Sugar Labs ensures
that others can develop diverse interfaces and applications from which governments
and schools can choose," the nonprofit said.

GNU/Linux will remain the platform of choice for the development and distribution
of Sugar, Bender said in an interview. However, Sugar Labs is not promoting
operating systems; it intends use open source as a tool to promote a learning
model, he said.

The give and take of the open-source development model embodies the culture
of learning and education. "A transfer of this culture could greatly enhance
the education industry and its ability to engage teachers and students,"
he said.

Whether the nonprofit helps port the Sugar UI to Windows is yet to be determined,
Bender said. "It is hard to imagine that a Windows port would be done without
the cooperation and participation of the core Sugar developers," he said.

The organization has its own
roadmap for developing the Sugar UI and it hopes to work with OLPC.

"For the moment at least, OLPC is continuing to fund the development,
so we anticipate a productive partnership, regardless of the fact that OLPC
will be offering Windows XP as an option," Bender said.

Sugar Labs, of which Bender is one of the founders, was announced the same
day OLPC announced it would start selling Windows XP on the XO laptop, an ultraportable
computer designed as a learning tool for kids in developing countries.

Bender resigned last month from OLPC as the group seemed to move toward loading
Windows XP on XO. His resignation earned him applause from the open-source community.

After Bender quit, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte questioned the development
process of Sugar, calling it a "weakness" due to unrealistic development
goals and practices. He urged the developer community to stop bickering, unite
and to help port the Sugar UI to Windows to make XO laptops more appealing to
users.

Sugar needs to be separated from the Linux OS core and made platform agnostic,
Negroponte wrote. "To do that, we need to hire more developers, work more
together and spend less time arguing," he wrote in an e-mail.

Developers in the open-source community expressed outrage at Negroponte's comments,
calling his appeal vague and demoralizing for Sugar's future development. The
comments spawned a debate on the merit of OLPC's move to the Windows OS.

Earlier this month, Kim Quirk, director of the technical team at OLPC, tried
to reassure developers that OLPC was committed to Sugar as an open-source project,
as it provides a great opportunity for learners as well as contributors, she
wrote in an e-mail.

IDG News Service

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