Sugar Labs Joins Conservancy

December 9, 2008

Sugar Labs today announced its membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization of Open Source and Free Software projects.

Sugar Labs supports the free and open source desktop environment, Sugar, originally created for the One Laptop per Child Project (OLPC). The Sugar community now has an active global developer base that is focused on engaging young children in learning through computing and the Internet. As a member of the Conservancy, the Sugar community will work to accelerate the adoption of the Sugar learning platform and strengthening the project by attracting new industry members and community contributors.

In May 2008, the Sugar project became independent of OLPC, making Sugar available to a wider community of Sugar developers and users. Subsequently Sugar has been ported to Debian, Ubuntu, and other GNU/Linux distributions. Sugar can now run on almost any computer hardware. In October 2008, Sugar Labs released Sugar Version 0.82, which features enhanced usability and stability. In November, Sugar announced the availability of the pre-alpha version of “Sugar on a Stick”, a LiveUSB image of Sugar that gives children access to Sugar on any computer with just a USB key. Joining the Conservancy is an important milestone in the path towards making Sugar available to children everywhere.

Founded in March 2006, the Conservancy allows developers of its member projects to unite under a common organization which provides much-needed administrative and logistical services to them. This structure spares each software project the burden of starting and maintaining its own independent non-profit organization. Sugar labs has joined as the Conservancy's fifteenth member project.