OLPC in trouble. Capitalism is an ugly system.

Nicholas Negroponde announced that the organization is laying off half of the staff due to economic difficulties. Basically what that means is that the OLPC laptop is not selling as much as it was expected and the organization did not take as many preorders as projected (or that some preorders where canceled due to some shady events....).

When OLPC was first announced everybody was talking about it and everybody wanted one. It had a open hardware/software approach that many people liked and the idea behind it was "free education for underprivileged kids of developing countries". Who could object to that? Some companies that discovered a new market maybe?

Capitalism is an ugly system. As soon as word got out, many big companies starting producing their own cheap netbooks and offering countries their solution to compete with the open architecture of OLPC. There were even stories that got out about bribing third world country officials for canceling OLPC orders and choose another solution of a certain company.

You think these kids would benefit from windows?

Lets hope though that this drawback will not be the end of OLPC as is. Negroponde is taking a shift to non free software approach. I wonder why? What there is to gain from installing a non free,closed operating system like windows on the OLPC? The kids certainly do not object to Linux. What about governments? Ahhhh, there you go. But why governments of developing countries object to free software? Think about it...

One Laptop Per Child - Give one Get one campaign

One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1 laptop is available again to the consumer market for anyone to buy. However you cannot just grab one for yourself but you have to buy one for a child in the developing world as well. This is not a bad thing if you ask me. As the campaign says so

Why give a laptop to a child in the emerging world? If you replace the word "laptop" with "education" the answer becomes clear.

The One Laptop Per Child foundation has partnered up with amazon. This is a wise choice since amazon is a very experienced partner when it comes shipping and handling orders and it is also accessible to even more people that want one. The price for the the give on get one deal is 399$. If you just want to donate one the price is 199$.

When XO-1 was announced there where no cheap ultra portables in the market. Since the arrival of the eeePC though everything changed. One can get one those gadgety laptops for the same price as the give one get one deal of XO-1. Why would he/she prefer the technically inferior XO-1 to the more trendy and powerful eeePC and the like.

The answer has probably something to do with the charity factor of the deal ,or because XO-1 is an excellent portable computer, or both. It is hard to crack, it has really long battery life, it has a very simple interface, it has an open architecture utilizing open source applications and it would make an excellent first computer for anyone's kid. At any rate, the One Laptop Per Child Idea gives children the opportunity for better education that otherwise would never have. If a west-world consumer can help to achieve that, he might just as well do. If he is to buy the eeePC as a fashion Item or simply as a useless gadget it is better to get an XO-1 for himself and buy one for an underprivileged kid in a developing country.