OLPC: the more we know, the more we marvel

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 06:33

Opinion and Analysis

The One Laptop per Child project is a forgotten entity these days - and rightly so. From being a high-profile unit it has degenerated into a curiosity.
But we continue to find out things about the project that we never knew - and had people known about some of these things one wonders how many of those who supported the project would have done so.

Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the project, was recently in Singapore and gave an interview to the Asian arm of am American technology news website. Some of his comments have riled one of the former  major contributors to the project, Ivan Krstic.

One may add here that the business of trying to gain publicity in the Third World for a moribund Western project is similar to what musicians regularly do - once one is over the hill and people in the West are no longer buying one's music, the trick is to visit the East and give a couple of concerts.

The laptop built by the OLPC is known as the XO; it had a learning-oriented GUI and a Linux-based operating system, both of which came to be known as Sugar, according to Krstic.

In the interview, Negroponte said the project had failed because Sugar was not run as an application.

"Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system. But what we did... was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management – it became sort of an omelet (sic). The BIOS talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess."

Krstic finds it funny that Negroponte was unaware of what Sugar really was. He says he campaigned as long as he could against creating a new GUI for the XO, simply because it was a case of reinventing the wheel; all the years of Linux development were being overlooked.

He says just two people were working on the Sugar interface for most of the OLPC's existence - in other words, there were no resources diverted from the operating system work to code for the UI. He blames the failure of the operating system on the hardware which the project chose to use.

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