Sugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks

In January the One Laptop Per Child project had to layoff 30 members of staff due to financial difficulties. Among them were almost all of the team working on the OLPC dedicated Sugar desktop. MIT Professor and head of the project, Nicholas Negroponte, announced at the time that further development of Sugar would be left entirely in the hands of the community.

South African developer Morgan Collett, together with the Sugar Labs Marketing Team, has now posted a project status report on his blog. The project, he says, has now reached its third month of development, with almost no support from OLPC.

Good news is that all the full time developers are sticking with the project. Says Collett, "Sugar has not lost any of its full-time core developers as a consequence of OLPC's layoffs: All of the core team will stay around as unpaid volunteers while we're looking for new ways to finance their full-time contribution." Collett mentions 20 contributors who are helping with engineering resources and travel costs, tendency rising. The project is determined to realize the planned March release of the next version, Sucrose 0.84, considering this a yardstick of their new independence.

At the same time, Sugar is working to establish local labs and grassroots organizationsto help fill the gaps the OLPC has left behind.