Stan Beer
Friday, 09 May 2008 09:14
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 4
It has been known for months that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, originally conceived by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, is opening an independent endorsed office in Australia. Now that the news has gone mainstream, questions arise as to why? In an interview with iTWire, OLPC Australia board director Jeff Waugh provides some answers and says why Microsoft Windows has no role.
Since its inception, the OLPC project has become
somewhat politicised. It would have been hard for the project not to
have political overtones since a key aim of the initiative is to sell
large quantities of its US$200 (originally supposed to be US$100) XO
laptop to the governments of underdeveloped countries.
Two of the five key representatives and board directors of OLPC in
Australia are Jeff Waugh and his partner Pia Waugh, both of whom have
been active in the Australian Linux community for some years in
addition to running their own open source consulting business. Jeff
Waugh is also a director of the GNOME Foundation, which promotes the
development of that Linux GUI.
The controversial OLPC program has provoked harsh interchanges between
OLPC advocates and vocal opponents, some of which have been reported on
iTWire.
One of the most widely reported public spats was the bust-up of a brief
relationship between OLPC and Intel. Nicholas Negroponte himself got
involved when he basically accused Intel of trying to sabotage the OLPC
program by actively promoting its Classmate laptop as an alternative
while ostensibly being a partner of OLPC. Then there was Scandinavian
aid organisation FAIR which dared to suggest in an open release that
donating recycled PCs for computer labs made more sense than selling
large quantities of cheap laptops to second and third world
governments.
That prompted Nicholas Negroponte to demand a public apology from FAIR.
There have also been the yeas and nays in the media. David Pogue has
extolled the virtues of the XO, calling it a kid magnet, while John
Dvorak described the XO as "a let them eat cake sort of message to the
world's poor."
Meanwhile, there have been mixed reports of the success of the OLPC
program to date. There have been some successes with XO laptops sold
into places like Uruguay, Peru and even Alabama!
There was also the the moderately successful get-one, give-one program
in the US last year. However, there have also been reports of problems
with the orders fulfillment process. highlighting the fact that OLPC
is not a professional, commercially oriented organisation experienced
in the dynamics of supply chain management.
Leading on from that the OLPC program faces another semingly looming
threat - competition from the commercial laptop makers. The US$200 XO,
available only in quantities of tens of thousands to governments, now
seems decidely expensive compared to the likes of the popular Asus Eee
PC which can bought from retail stores in the US by consumers for less
than US$250. In the space of less than a year Asus has sold more than 1
million units of the Eee PC, considerably more than the number of XO
laptops OLPC has managed to place so far.
When the new Rudd Labor Government took office late last year, Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd made providing subsidised laptops to Australian
school children a key manifesto.
It is in this climate that the launch of OLPC Australia has
been announced. As a consequence a number of pertinent questions need
to asked and these have been put to Jeff Waugh, who has been happy to
provide some answers. CONTINUED
