olpc

The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It's all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.

"I quit when Nicholas told me -- and not just me -- that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward," writes Krstić.

Allie and I talk about joining the Peace Corps (one of these days) and I keep saying that while there, I'd like to wire up the place. I thought about proposing to the OLPC project, but this Open-Mesh initiative looks really interesting, too. The fact that the hardware is cheap is mainly what I'm looking at (cheaper than a bunch of soekris boards), but the fact that they're open source friendly is even better.

Besides, I think I'd get rather cranky after a few months (days, really) of no internet.

Turns out that Drupal could be a flexible software application for the OLPC laptop. Three hours later (minus four hours spent hunting down a bug noted below) Drupal was up and running. Right now, I'm viewing the Drupal site being served off the OLPC next to my desk from my MacBook via its private IP address. Wow, it's fast! The hardest part about the installation was the small keyboard ; ).

Just think of all the applications that - once made lighter - students could get on their OLPC laptops. Our next move it to get our intranet package on the OLPC machine - its light weight wiki could help students collaborate together on their own machines. You can imagine how Drupal and OLPC can be used to help organize classrooms where students use OLPCs in a mesh network, with or without greater internet connectivity. We all know Drupal can do practically anything and can usually do it quite well. Now there is the opportunity for classroom intranets, student-editable wikis, and teacher portals to run on OLPCs. Each OLPC can be a web server, with the potential to serve Drupal to other students and teachers. That leaves the possibility for each child of OLPC to become a web content manager, a web server administrator, a content collaborator/creator, and ultimately, a Drupal hacker.

But getting back to what you really want to know - how we did it. (Note: We'll maintain a wiki of these instructions on the groups.drupal.org page.)

We caught up with him for an hour long interview while he was in the city of Hyderabad. RMS heaped praises for the One Laptop Per Child Project. He is even contemplating making a switch to XO, the flagship machine of the project, from his "old thinkpad". Stallman went on to say that the OLPC laptop has given people a way to use the free BIOS. Lack of a widely available free BIOS has remained a major issue in the free software community. Stallman has always stressed for the need to use free softwares in educational institutes. The OLPC project has only made him happier.

How simple is it? In Nigeria a 5-year-old girl with a can-do spirit took it upon herself to troubleshoot and repair the OLPCs of her classmates, said Jepsen. A teacher encouraged her, and the class set up a 'Laptop Hospital,' where the kids learn to repair their own hardware.

How is this green? Shipping is greatly reduced if people can fix their own gadgets on site. Jepsen pointed out that communities in Peru that now have OLPCs take 20 days to reach via roads from major cities. Instead of tossing whole products that have one or two problems, people can swap out individual pieces, leading to much less resource use.

Plus, the whole reason for the OLPC was to serve as a powerful educational tool. When young people, or any consumers, learn better how things work, and take responsibility for them, their experience is enriched. And they learn to take care of things better, which leads to longer life, and less resource use.

I think it's really awesome that they're learning (and at such a young age) how to fix their computers. It looks like they've already got a leg up on their Western counterparts.

Source code for SimCity has been released under the GPLv3. For legal reasons the open source version was renamed Micropolis, which was apparently the original working title. The OLPC will also be getting a SimCity branded version that has been QA'ed by Electronic Arts.

Nick says of Intel: "They were selling laptop with their brand on it directly to exactly the same people we were talking to. They would go in even after we had signed contracts and try to persuade government officials to scrap their contract and sign a contract with them instead. That's not a partnership." Apparently OLPC had six million dollars on the way from Intel before they scrapped the partnership, but Nick Neg had had enough. "Each time it happened they said they would correct their ways. It's a little like cheating on your spouse, or alcoholism, or something you just can't eventually fix and we had to finally part ways." Intel sees it differently, of course. "I don't want to get into specifics but we met every obligation that we were committed to," said Intel's Paul Otellini, who called Negroponte's version of events "hogwash." Intel's version of the story states that OLPC wanted Intel to drop its non-XO projects, namely Classmate PC. This was obviously always an awkward union, given the respective organizations' competing products, but you'd really hope for a bit more maturity in the breakup given the fact that this is all, you know, for the kids.