Friday, September 18, 2009

Free education as in free speech

It's great to see more and more fellow FLOSS enthusiasts realizing both the impact of education in our goals and the importance of free software in improving our society, this time by impacting children's education.

Celebrating tomorrow's Software Freedom Day, the Free Software Foundation and Sugar Labs are announcing a partnership to improve learning with free software:

http://www.fsf.org/news/sugar-labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org/press

If you are a software developer concerned about the challenges that our global society faces and think that early education is part of the solution, please consider contributing to Sugar Labs. You don't even need to get your hands dirty in Sugar code if you don't wish to, there's plenty of code elsewhere in the stack that will benefit our young users, for example:

* Improve the rendering performance of librsvg for the kind of icons used in Sugar,

* Add tile-based rendering to Evince #303365,

* Improve GObject-Introspection support in PyGObject (what used to be called PyBank),

* Improve startup performance and memory usage of Python by reducing eager loading of module dependencies,

* Improve Linux' handling of low memory conditions in userspace,

* Package Sugar for your favorite distro,

* Improve the infrastructure for Live USB images in your favorite distro,

* Spread this call for help.

Of course, if you prefer to help us develop the Sugar shell and its activities we'll be happy to help you put your skills on use. Just say hi in #sugar @ Freenode or in sugar-devel.

And as any other FOSS project, we also need testers, bug triagers, designers, web developers, technical writers, you name it.