OLPC: one laptop per hungry child

Sam Varghese
Saturday, 14 June 2008 08:47

Opinion and Analysis

The OLPC still believes that it has relevance - and there are lots of supporters out there who believe the same thing. But then we humans are a gullible lot - remember Jim Jones and how he convinced 900 people to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide?

Some of the idealists in the ranks have gone their separate ways - the chief technical officer, Mary-Lou Jepsen, the president Walter Bender and the chief security officer Ivan Krstic have all quit. They were the guts of the project. Negroponte provides the flights of fantasy.

But why go to Haiti to carry out these experiments? According to one of America's great intellectuals, Gore Vidal, the US is the most ignorant country in the first world. The OLPC is aimed at education, isn't it? I was always taught that charity begins at home. Why not deploy some XOs at home, Nick?

Why are all these experiments carried out in poor countries which have no choice but to yield to the whims of Americans, ideas which are not particularly well conceived and which often fall flat on their face? Spreading democracy to Iraq hasn't exactly gone swiimingly has it?

The OLPC was supposed to use open source software and an user interface called Sugar was developed to run on a modified version of the Linux operating system.

To add to the open source aura, OLPC vice-president of software Jim Gettys attended Australia's national Linux conference in January and handed out a few of the laptops to some of the geeks present, much in the same way that one gives sweets to children.

But that aura was rudely stripped away when Negroponte waltzed into the arms of Microsoft, deciding that Windows was the answer to the project's problems. Nigeria, for example, opted not to go with the OLPC and instead chose Intel's Classmate PC running Windows. Intel's deal, it must be remembered, is not guised in any way - it does not claim to be doing good. It is selling laptops for money. (According to BusinessWeek, the Microsoft tax is only $US3 per laptop).

But the OLPC is a non-profit organisation. Only the salaries of the staff have to be paid. Since it is a private body, nobody knows how much those who work for the project are paid. It is not a charity - the word non-profit often does serve to deter people from asking hard questions.

Australia and Australians have often followed Uncle Sam and Americans into various ventures blindly - remember the little matter of the war in Iraq? - and the OLPC is no exception. An Australian branch has come into being but one of its directors, Jeff Waugh, has gone on the record to say that Windows will not be provided.

"I have no idea as to why Windows is regarded as relevant to this and some of the stuff in the press about running Sugar on Windows and things like that - well Windows is just an operating system that doesn't deliver on the vision of OLPC," he told iTWire editor Stan Beer in an interview in May.

Of course, this may seem to be in direct defiance of head office but never mind. No Windows. Waugh has spoken.

The parent body has made it clear that the laptops will be deployed in the poor countries of the Asia-Pacific region.

Yeah, maybe the unrest in the Solomons can be ended by dispatching a planeload of XOs to Honiara. And what about Fiji, which sees a coup practically every season? Send a truckload of the OLPC laptops to Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who took over after the latest coup, and Fiji will surely have nothing but peace within its borders in the years ahead.