BOSTON, Mass — December 22, 2008 — Sugar Labs, a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, is joining the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board. Sugar Labs creates software for young children used on platforms like the One Laptop Per Child's XO. Sugar is based on the GNOME platform and relies on technologies like GTK+ and Telepathy.

"The resources made available by the GNOME project have been essential to the development of the Sugar learning platform", says Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs. "The Sugar community looks forward to working more closely with the GNOME Foundation on topics such as GNOME Mobile and an upstream collaboration framework." Walter Bender will be representing Sugar Labs on the GNOME Advisory Board.

GNOME forms the basis of many platforms such as Sugar, Maemo, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and also delivers the desktop platform offered by companies such as Novell, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. GNOME is actively cooperating with the makers of these platforms in order to make sure that they can use GNOME technologies as efficiently and effectively as possible and to enable cross-fertilization of resources. Members of the GNOME Advisory Board help the GNOME Foundation work with partner companies effectively and they also get a chance to collaborate with each other on their use of GNOME technologies.

"The GNOME Foundation is excited to have Sugar Labs join the advisory board." says Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. "Sugar embodies the GNOME mission of making sure technology is available to anyone, not just technical people, regardless of culture, financial well-being or physical ability. The interface provided by Sugar offers an innovative way to interact with technology and the internet. This work is heavily influencing the GNOME community as they think about potential ways to improve GNOME in the future."

Sugar Labs is a non-profit foundation which serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and create Sugar-compatible applications. Sugar provides an interface to engage young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. Sugar is licensed under the GPL and uses GTK+ and Telepathy. For more information see http://sugarlabs.org.