OLPC no longer wants to change the world

Sam Varghese
Monday, 09 February 2009 04:02

Opinion and Analysis

The only thing this can mean is that the smaller deployments are costing the organisation too much; as with any other kind of hardware, manufacturing and deployment in large volumes keeps the cost down.

Collett said, in his blog post, that the change of policy would affect further deployments in South Africa; there were more than 600 XOs deployed in the country, with more planned.

Last month, the founder of the OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte, outlined new goals for the project. At that time he said that with regard to deployments, Latin America would be spun off into a separare support unit and sub-Saharan Africa would become a major learning hub. In other words, both regions were being abandoned.

The focus, he said, would be on the Middle East, Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. Coincidentally, the US has a major military presence in these three regions.

Negroponte also announced that half the staff would be sacked and those remaining would have to take pay cuts. His announcement, curiously, did not mention the word "education".

Instead, it merely said: "...we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries."

The learning platform Sugar - originally developed to run on a modified version of Linux - has been spun off as well and is now being developed at a non-profit called Sugar Labs run by Walter Bender, a former OLPC official. Both Sugar and Linux gave the OLPC an open source aura when the project was kicked off.

The project's focus now seems to be getting Windows to run on the XO - that is, if it lasts long enough to see deployment of such laptops.