Digital Trends
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) famously aimed to create the $100 laptop and make it available to schoolchildren throughout the world. It never reached that cost target – the actual figure is close to double that – but it’s made a big impact, and now it hopes to make and even bigger one.
Speaking at the TED 2009 conference, founder Nicholas Negroponte announced that the company would open source its hardware design and encourage others to a copy it, according to blogger Ethan Zuckerman.
The much-touted One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has announced it is laying off half its staff and reducing salaries for its remaining employees, blaming the global economic downturn for the restructuring. At the same time, the program is vowing to do more with less, including spinning off the development of the Linux-based Sugar operating system to the OLPC community and working to deploy a $0 laptop for the worlds least developed nations.
The changes leave the OLPC program with 32 people.
The One Laptop Per Child project as re-launched its Give One Get One program, making it possible for individual customers in developed nations to donate an OLPC XO laptop to a child in a developing region—or donate a notebook and set their hands on one of the OLPC XO laptops for themselves. Although the program was embraced last year by donors willing to support the project to get computers to children in developing nations, the initial Give One Get One program plagued by shipping and delivery problems. This year, the One laptop Per Child project has partnered with Amazon.com to handle shipping and fulfillment in hopes of improving customers’ experience.
Microsoft Corporation and the non-profit One Laptop Per Child project has announced an agreement that will put Windows XP on the OLPC XO laptop—albeit with a higher price tag attached. OLPC XO’s will still be available with the organization’s Linux-based operating system and education-centric Sugar interface, but versions will also be available with XP, which should make the notebooks easier to sell to governments and educational programs who want to be sure students are acquiring marketable skills. The companies also plan to work together on a version of the XO notebook that can boot into either XP or Sugar, and the OLPC foundation says it plans to work with third parties to port the Sugar interface to Windows.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has announced that current CFO Charles Kane will be stepping into the roles of President and Chief Operating Officer of the organization as the non-profit looks to put recent snafus and key personnel losses behind then. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte will stay on board as Chairman, and will focus on fundraising and promoting OLPC to world governments; Kane will assume responsibility for all OLPC operations, as well as negotiating agreements with third parties.
The OLPC project’s director of security architecture Ivan Krstić has resigned from the non-profit organization, characterizing OLPC’s recent restructuring as “drastic” and a radical shift from the organization’s original goals. Krstić revealed on a Web site entry he resigned the post three weeks ago.
“Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project,” Krstić wrote. “I cannot subscribe to the organization’s new aims or structure in good faith, nor can I reconcile them with my personal ethic.”
The One Laptop Per Child project got its start in academia, with the MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte floating the idea of developing $100 laptop computers to be deployed in school systems throughout the developing world to ensure entire generations of humanity don’t get left out of the digital revolution.
When it was launched a few years ago at MIT, the One Laptop Per Child project came under some criticism from domestic groups who argued it was disingenuous for the project to focus on the needs of educational systems in developing nations when there were plenty of needful, under-served children and students right in the OLPC organization’s backyard in the United States.
Who would have guessed it: Non-profit companies and for-profit companies don’t get along too well when they’re both peddling the same product. It shouldn’t come as any huge surprise then, that Intel has recently cut off its involvement in the One Laptop Per Child program, which it only been participating in since July.
When Nicholas Negroponte originally set out to build a laptop from the ground up and as cheaply as possible, that decision included omitting commercial software like Windows in favor of Linux. Two years later, the One Laptop Per Child program has moved the XO Laptop from dream to reality – and now Microsoft wants in.
Microsoft officially announced on Wednesday that it was internally developing a version of Windows XP that will be able to run on flash-based laptops such as the XO. Early development has already begun, real-world tests will commence in January 2008, and, with any luck, widespread availability will begin by the second half of 2008.
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