Friday, May 16, 2008

Bender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs

After a recent title change, One Laptop Per Child's former president Walter Bender has left to found another nonprofit, Sugar Labs Foundation.

Sugar is an open-source educational software platform originally developed for OLPC's XO laptop. Bender, former president of software and content at OLPC and later its director of deployment, said in an e-mail that the split from OLPC happened because "the natural evolution of Sugar is to grow beyond the constraints of a single hardware platform." OLPC announced earlier today that the Cambridge-based nonprofit would partner with Microsoft Corp. to put Windows XP on its laptops. Sugar Labs said its interface will be available on other hardware, such as the ASUS Eee PC.

Bender said the Sugar user interface is a departure from the desktop metaphor from computing. Students and teachers will be able to communicate and collaborate with or without Internet access, he said.

"Information is about nouns; learning is about verbs," Bender said via e-mail.

Bender, formerly of MIT's Media Lab, said Sugar has already been ported to multiple Linux distributions and can run on a range of hardware from different vendors. Sugar is based on Python and was developed with Red Hat Inc. and Pentagram.