[LINK] OLPC's a con - former insider

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

OLPC's a con - former insider
Departing software chief stings Negroponte
By Andrew Orlowski
Published Friday 16th May 2008 14:38 GMT
The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/16/krstic_olpc/

The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has 
blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman 
Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It's all about shipping 
kit, says Ivan Krstic in an incendiary essay.

"I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was 
never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting 
as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning 
would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software 
team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward," writes Krstic.

"Nicholas' new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the 
mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop 
manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on 
their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn't work."

Ouch.

Negroponte's decision to embrace Windows has seen top-level resignations 
from the OLPC project. CTO Mary Lou Jepsen left in January, and former 
software chief and president Walter Bender departed in April. Krstic 
resigned in March. <http://radian.org/notebook/maintaining-clarity>

OLPC is a poster child for free software innovation, with critics 
acknowledging value in its advances in mesh networking and the radical 
task-based UI Sugar. But the F/OSS ideals are now being jetissoned, 
writes Krstic, along with the crown jewels:

"In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He's told me so. 
That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip 
service to the notion of its 'availability' as an option to purchasing 
countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster."

Not everyone <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000762.html> 
thinks Sugar is a successful UI - judge for yourself in our extensive 
hands-on. 
<http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/01/17/review_xo_laptop_hands_on/>

You can read more of this wide-ranging and thoughtful essay here. 
<http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi>

"I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries 
is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the 
colonies," adds Python language author Guido van Rossum in the comments.

-- 
 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au