Did you know that the OLPC project is the largest single "customer" of
Fedora in the entire world?
The rumours of OLPC's death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite some
unfortunate statements by the project's erstwhile CEO, the OLPC project is
still *extremely* focused on succeeding in its noble goal -- the education
of the world's children -- with the use of free software as the central
component of their software strategy. And they are, in fact, succeeding,
even though the open source community has largely turned its collective
back on that success. Which is, I think, a shame.
Let me share some numbers with you. They might surprise you. I know they
surprised me when I heard them a few weeks ago at FUDCon.
OLPC has shipped over 300,000 units to kids around the world. They plan to
ship at least another 50,000 more each month, and very likely more than
that. It's entirely possible that by the end of 2008, there will be a
million OLPC systems deployed worldwide.
Of those systems, 100% of them currently run Fedora, and 0% of them
currently run Windows -- despite the press clippings you may have read.
The OLPC project is based on Fedora. The engineers at OLPC have invested
thousands of person-hours in making Fedora a successful base for OLPC
deployments. Fedora is now, and will continue to be, the base operating
system for the OLPC project. Period.
It's time for the Fedora community to step up and represent.
* * *
There will be many opportunities for members of the Fedora community and
the OLPC communities to help one another in the coming months. I intend to
spend most of my time identifying those opportunities and helping to
making them happen.
The first opportunities are for the Fedora packagers. This work can be
done right now, today.
Understandably, the OLPC folks want to focus their efforts on the
challenges that are unique to the OLPC project. Which means that they
should be shedding all work that can more easily be handled by others.
Package maintenance is a perfect example of this kind of work.
Here is a list of packages that are either badly needed by OLPC:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WishList#OLPC_Wishlist
These packages are either unavailable in Fedora, or are currently being
maintained, poorly, by overworked OLPC engineers who can't invest enough
time to do them justice. There are lots of simple issues that even novice
packagers could handle. Missing or broken dependencies. Creation of
dead-simple activity packages. And so on.
If there's one thing that Fedora community engineers do exceptionally
well, it's package maintenance. If every current Fedora packager
volunteered to own *one single package* that is crucial to OLPC, we would
immediately free the core OLPC team for much more strategic work. It's a
big, immediate win, and the entire OLPC team will be delighted to receive
your help.
Fedora packagers: please consider adopting one of these packages and
giving it a loving home. I will keep asking. :)
--g
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