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Keeping people learning one single platform, why don't take OS X for instance? Is much clean and not desktop lock in...

The reason of OLPC was failing was Intel Class Mate pc, bad design decisions, the mesh and eventually the price.

For me, Sugar is great as much they learn to use the computer in an agnostic way, means to not learn XP interface and at the end to be blown away by the Vista's or Windows 7 interface. Is a share that person to get in any way desktop locked in by only one monopoly, even is MS or Apple. The future is education, not the companies!

"Stallman doesn't appear to actually give an acrobatic shit about learning, and sees OLPC as a vehicle for furthering his political agenda. It's shameful, the lot of it."

Learning can be viewed differently by different people.
Learning your times tables, geography etc. are all well and good but really learning is about learning to be able to learn for yourself, to learn to be interested in how things and other people work.


Using Free software means that the kids are more likely to be able to learn about software and how their computer works. The philosophy behind Free software also fosters a sense of community, learning about community is extremely important for young people, this is something that is sadly largely lacking in modern education.

To some degree programming is something that every computer user should know a little about. I've seen so many users waste so much time because they think that pointing and dragging a thousand times is the only way to get the job done.

I learnt what I hated about UI's from using some of the worst ones. That taught me more than having a perfect UI to begin with. GUI designers are all so vain they fail to see a bigger picture when it comes to practicality.

I think krstic was a bit unfair to Stallman and other FOSS advocates in this post. Besides, the free (let's assume) advertisement to Apple at the expense of GNU/Linux was unfortunate, and the free advertisement to Microsoft doesn't make it any better. But maybe he was only voicing his frustration and disagreement with unrealistic expectations, that you can throw half-working software to children and expect them to become happy kernel programmers all by themselves just because it's FOSS, without any kind of teaching plan. At the end of the post, he clarifies his position:

" Now, pay close attention: while I'm unequivocally enthusiastic about Sugar being ported to every OS out there, I'm absolutely opposed to Windows as the single OS that OLPC offers for the XO. [...]

OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor. It should not believe the nonsense about Windows being a requirement for business after the children grow up. Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business. And OLPC shouldn’t make its sole OS one that cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project’s laptops apart: released versions of Windows can neither make good use of the XO power management, nor its full mesh or advanced display capabilities.

Most importantly, the OS that OLPC ships should be one that embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to. The culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, of freely doing and debugging â€" this is important. OLPC has a responsibility to spread the culture of freedom and ideas that support its educational mission; that cannot be done by only offering a proprietary operating system for the laptops.

Put differently, OLPC can't claim to be preoccupied with learning and not with training children to be office computer drones, while at the same time being coerced by hollow office drone rhetoric to deploy the computers with office drone software. Nicholas used to say the thought of the XOs being used to teach 6-year olds Word and Excel made him cringe. Apparently, no longer so. Which is it? The vacillation needs to stop. As they say in the motherland: shit or get off the pot."

I could'n have said it better.

Edited 2008-05-14 15:40 UTC

As noble was the project, but reality bit it and soon it start behaving like schizophronic personality. Dont have any direction and ivory tower professors(even from MIT) dont realize reailty of real world.

Think from eyes of a third world children who have Never seen a computer in their life. they never have read even fancy colorful books. All they need is a simple, computer which they can read and write books and alphabets and maths. Any old days 386 will perform better. I dont mean TW kids dont deserve latest technology, just they dont need it at this moment.

Imagine you have never driven a car and someone is ready to give you a most utility Jeep right away but promise fancy Ferrari after 3 years.which would you take. Give these kids what they need to start their interaction with technology. A windows mobile powered cellphone(or symbion) worth $100 will do better job than much promised OLPC.

I challenge Mr Negroponte to implement OLPC project with US kids(which are way backwards in reading, maths and science..37th). And prove that it improves their skills before looting TW govts with empty promises.

I have to say it's a very interesting article. It sheds some negative light on Negroponte and I must admit, I'm disappointed in the way OLPC seems to be screwed up by some of its leaders.

However, I don't think it's a good thing to digress fulminating against free software/open source. It might be that some people, out of irritation with some of Linux's quirks on their crappy hardware, go out and buy Macs, and it might be that Mac OS X could have been an interesting platform for something like the XO.

But this doesn't mean that free software would be somehow discredited all of a sudden. It's not just about kids wanting to or not wanting to hack their own software together or get to the inner workings of their OS and programs. It's also about an educational infrastructure that is not tied to any specific vendor. If not all of the kids turn hackers, and of course they won't, at least an educational institution's software infrastructure should, one might argue, be open and independent of any software firm.

In a 'winner takes all' market this is not something to think light of. Even politicians these days (in some places at least) have discovered that it is preferable for public institutions to use open source software by default. It has nothing to do with any religious conviction, it's an extension of the democratic freedom of the public to not be dependent of any one corporation.

The XO, by the way, is still potentially far cooler than any of the 'Classmate' variants out there today. The latter are just nice cheap little crappy laptops, the former actually is something innovative and interesting. And it's about design quality too, in a world where most laptops out there are designed to fall apart after only a few years.

Yes, I did try them out both.
Sure, this was about education. So instead of the XO now, are we going to send those poor kids our crap Pentium 3 white boxes again?

I don't understand why is there such an opposition to sugar. And I don't understand why so many people perceive the project as a failure, especially in a technical site like this.

I'm not a kid, so I won't speak from theory, just from the adult end user experience (not the intended target, but I doubt anyone here has credentials on techno and education either).

Sugar seems to me the perfect UI for the type of physical device it was designed for. Very easy to point, very clean usability concepts. The last joyride builds are simply awesome. Performance lags, and the Journal needs a lot of love, but the concept and even present day usability is great. And the cute programming interface actually reminds me a lot of how I got fascinated with computers when I was a kid.

While I understand the strategic mistake of taking on so many fronts at the same time, I doubt that the goals of the project can be successful without a major rethinking of the interface. The project could benefit from collaboration with Ubuntu Mobile or something like that, but something along those lines would have been needed anyway. A regular desktop OS is not a good fit for this computer, you can install it (pretty easily, I've done that in a few minutes) but the window metaphor has a limit in this type of machine and needs more than just tweaking. The Sugar UI in all its imperfections is still my preferred interface.

And from a kid's perspective it's really easy to install whatever flavor of linux you want in it. In short, let's not forget how great these little machines are, and the technical prowess (both in hardware and software) they achieved, even creating the market for low-cost, tiny laptops. I thought that this is what people in this site would have been more interested about rather than discussing the pitfalls of management a project of this magnitude, and self congratulating for old pretentious prophecies cast with little real knowledge on the subject.

To first step in accomplishing a complex goal is to determine what you want to accomplish. This is the executive role in companies/organizations. The goals of OLPC have changed.

The initial OLPC goals include:
"We are non-profit: constructionism is our goal; XO is our means of getting there. It is a very cool, even revolutionary machine, and we are very proud of it. But we would also be delighted if someone built something better, and at a lower price." (http://www.olpcnews.com/olpc_mission/olpc_mission.htm). This indicates they wish to provide tools that will allow people to learn to fix and extend their systems on their own. For this mission FLOSS is really the optimal choice.

The new OLPC goals include:
"OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an endâ€"an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community."
(http://laptop.org/en/vision/mission/index.shtml). This goal indicates that they wish to connect people to current world.

The two goals are NOT the same. To me goal the old goal represents a fairly basic change from how things are done today since it encourages localizing solutions, learning to fix your own problems and sharing information. Most solutions today rely on the global economy for many things and knowledge must be purchased (IP). The new goal seems to simply represent getting people on the internet in the same way we do today. I believe this is why many people have conflicting views of the changes at OLPC. If the old goals were significantly more important than the new ones changing to the new one will likely be seen as a betrayal (especially if you supported it through work or money). If you feel the new goal is more important than the old goals then you likely will not see it as a betrayal merely changing to "real world requirements".

For me this explains most of the changes that are going on at OLPC.

Personally, I have a hard time trusting a non-profit that changes its goals so significantly without publicly soliciting the advice of its current supporters.

It will take a lot of additional planning to address the new environment presented by the new goals and I have not seen any indication they are addressing them. One example is OS support, will MS / Apple provide free or low cost support for these PCs if they ship with their OS? Will they provide means to do offline updates (since many of these will have only sporadic internet connection)? If not, how will these people deal with the problem of updates and support? Windows XP is not a commercial product anymore (XP has reached EOL), will new hardware be supported?

Without better long term planning I can see several roll-outs that will be "successful" but decay over a year or two. Unfortunately, from what I've read long term planning does not seem to be a strong suit of the current OLPC upper management.

It's just another rant from a former employee. To be polite because the reality is he is incompetent and did not know what he was doing yet choose to try and do the job and instead of working at fixing the problem he decided to quit ...

None of is point have anything to do directly with the OLPC , it's sound more like the wrong opinion of people we hear here all the time.

The fact are this : GNU/Linux is offering a solution , Windows and Mac OS X make claim but there OS don't run on the hardware even after it was modified to help them get on it, and hiking the price of the hardware in the process .

OLPC asked for the impossible , and they got a partial solution from GNU/Linux and no one else.

Sure if the budget had been 10k per child then we would have seen Apple and Microsoft all over it with real solution both hardware and software and teacher program , ready for deployment.

As it is there is no budget , for anything , only small programs and small donations. For the size of the task.

In a perfect world the Proprietary OS and proprietary software would contribute there old version so that the program to client that will never be able to afford there solution for now can be educated and one day there country reach a level where they can afford to buy any solution for education.

As it is only Free Software and GNU/Linux are doing the job , The OLPC is plagued by inside treachery and inside competitors and Management who change there mind and the targets by the months , with incompetent employee.

The task is an impossible one and the only one that show up and do the job are being satirized and devilized by people who are unable to provide any solution for the exisiting hardware and who's current offer are worth 20k per individual. Who never tried to do the job a slong as they existed.

There is always money to protect the rich and there interest , when it's a fact they don't pay taxe or avoid paying there share , there is millions and billions for obsolete weapons and weapons programs.

Yet there is never any money to spend to educate the poor and provide them tools to make there lives better.

At the end of the day , we can listen to critics who don't do the job , the quiter who never finished there jobs , Multinationnal worth billions who don't even participate.

Or we listen to those who try and do the job and ignore the rants.