“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

--Bill Gates

Summary: Project founder Nicholas Negroponte explains what is really harming the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative

THE former engineers of the OLPC project deny that GNU/Linux and Sugar were ever at fault. Instead, the real story has already been told in many posts and Nicholas Negroponte tells it like it is, also refuting a previous allegation that Sugar was to blame. He writes in response to a scathing piece:

I do not normally answer press and blogs, because we would spend all our time with words, not actions in the field But you are on a UN site and the UN is our partner. Check out Kofi Annan’s words -- they have been fulfilled. Has it been harder than I expected? Yes. But do you know why? It is not due to what I had anticipated, things like corruption and logistics. It has been due to commercial interests and press, stories like yours.

As a small non-profit, humanitarian organization, it is hard to battle giants who view children as a market, not a mission, and have other agendas.

This is why the likes of Microsoft and proprietary software in general (even Adobe) need to be kept out of education [1, 2, 3]. They poison education by leveraging the system to make themselves young clients. Watch how Microsoft approached the OLPC project (confidential memo from Comes vs Microsoft litigation).

In other news about OLPC, some more units are being distributed right now.

Under this program, 1,250 laptop computers will be distributed to students in 13 schools.

Here is another new report from OLPC News. ⬆