OLPC growing pains

The entire OLPC team is extremely interested in supporting outside developers. There's no question about it, and there never was.

What's also true is that -- so far -- we've been in the unenviable position of having to grow a platform (both Sugar and the distro) with heavy low-level development taking place _in parallel_ with high- level activity development. This is extremely difficult to do in any set of circumstances, and doubly so with our resource constraints and timelines. As a result, we haven't been as good as we could be about leveraging the community and outside developers. We're fully aware of this, we know it can be really frustrating for contributors, and we're determined to get better. I expect things will improve significantly in this domain in a couple of months as underlying platform development begins to stabilize and our focus turns increasingly towards activities and other consumers of our platform and APIs.

Until then, I can only thank everyone who's been bearing with us even if it feels like there's a line in the sand between 1CC and "outsiders" at times. Communities are hard work, and we're entirely committed to growing a great one around OLPC. Really. Please be patient with us a little longer, and as Wikipedians like to say, assume good faith.

Derived from http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2007-September/006440.html