Many people who want to see the connectivity of the net more broadly distributed have been enthusiastically following Nicholas Negroponte's project "One Laptop Per Child." (OLPC) The idea was to get a laptop called "Children's Machine XO" out on the market at $100 per laptop, using open source software. From there, the long term ideal of the project would be to get one each into the hands of all the world's children. But on April 26, Negroponte announced a new deal. The OLPC machine is going to run on Windows and now the price is going to be $175. He also backed off their goal of an initial 5 million unit production run, and has instituted several other policy changes.
The politics behind it: It's generally understood that Microsoft had enough power in many nations across the globe to pressure them – indeed blackmail them -- from buying the open source versions of OLPC. OLPC enthusiasts feel that another "change the world" project has been turned into just another mass marketing opportunity for the Evil Empire.
On the independent "One Laptop Per Child News" site, Lee Felsentein – the computer revolutionary who – with Efrem Lipkin, started the Homebrew Computer Club that basically started Personal Computing, suggests that those who worked on the open source version of OLPC will now be excluded from participation and that they should take their work and run – try to do this as an independent project.
Felsenstein writes: "What is the status of the code base currently developed for OLPC? Is it accessible and freely available to be used by others? Someone closer to the project should make sure that this code base cannot be appropriated and kept from use by others.
"If the XO machine becomes unavailable to those who develop external software for it, then a replacement platform should be designed. This isn’t the hard part – the foundation of the project will be the software, especially the application software. I would recommend that a substitute platform for software development be specified and made available."
No doubt, if and when the OLPC machine starts getting distributed, it will be better than nothing (but not much better, considering Windows' famous vulnerabilities). And Bill Gates will be all over the media getting and taking credit for this idealistic project to bring computing to the world's poor. And the initial impetus behind the project will get no media coverage and will never penetrate the mainstream discourse. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "And so it goes."
Read the entire Lee Felsenstein piece
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Please, let's get the history right. I worked with Efrem Lipkin who initiated the Community Memory Project, an important experiment in using computers to develop the "commons of information", starting in 1972. Efrem was not involved in the Homebrew Computer Club.
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