With the announcement of Windows on the XO Laptop and general bad times at the OLPC project, a sort of spin-off company has been formed called Sugar Labs, according to Ars Technica. With some of the OLPC project’s recent decisions and advances in technology, Sugar Labs, not the OLPC project, may soon be the group to watch.

The Sugar Labs spin-off is, as you may have guessed from the name, continuing the development of the Sugar interface, the rather unusual, but supposedly more intuitive to those who have never used a PC before, interface that the Linux XO used in the past. The difference between Sugar Labs and the OLPC project in the past, though, is that they do not intend to create their own hardware. I believe this is a very smart plan, since there are now commercially available laptops at almost the same price point as the XO. Since there is little that is unique about the XO hardware anymore, or at least soon there will not be much unique about it, I think that Sugar Labs made the right decision to drop it. They are, instead, in talks with several hardware makers. (As for the XO2 bringing new innovation to the XO hardware, I am skeptical that the changes are the right changes to make.)

Of course there is still the argument that Windows is really the better platform for these devices. Without even getting in to the arguments about why OSS is better for this sort of stuff (cheaper, source code is available, governmental adoption, school adoption, and so on,) think about it this way: the OLPC project initially had two advantages, hardware and software. The hardware advantage is now basically gone due to technological advances in the area of cheap, small laptops, and they have just thrown out their software advantage in favor of Windows. Now it is easy for other groups and companies to duplicate what the OLPC project is doing. Sugar Labs, however, has kept the software advantage and is, therefor, more likely to succeed.

Although the OLPC project will be almost certainly the more watched of the two projects for some time, it has lost all of its competitive advantages and, unless some major changes happen, the OLPC project’s influence and importance will disappear and Sugar Labs will be the group to watch.