While reading one of the hundreds of e-mails related to OLPC that I've been finding in my inbox these past few days I realized something: When we're talking about "Sugar" everyone seems to have a different idea of just what it is. Obviously the lack of a clear understanding of "Sugar" make every discussion about it that much harder. There are several different perceptions of what "Sugar" is or at least should be. The three most popular ones seem to be: (1) Sugar is the User Interface. It's all about the UI and how information is presented to the user. It's also a tailored UI in that it's very much adapted to the target user group, children, instead of the jack-of-all-trades software solutions that we're used to. (2) Sugar is really the technology developed for OLPC. It's the underlying services used on the XO such as collaboration, the presence service, the data store and so on. (3) Sugar is the overall user experience on the XO. It's been argued that Sugar really is the combination of both the UI and the underlying technologies and that separating one entity from the other would break the whole concept. Here is my (slightly philosophical) take on the situation: Sugar is a "gravitational force" when it comes to developing software, content and services for educational purposes. ... http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/the_power_of_sugar.html -- http://karounos.gr/blog/