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This leaves the impression that they haven't even worked out what this manual charging method will be, and might be leaving it for future editions of the OLPC. If this is wrong, can someone post a link that shows the manual charging system?

Let's be economically realistic here. If you look at the OLPC progress timescale here:
http://laptop.org/en/vision/progress/index.shtml
You will notice that the price tag of 100$ per laptop initiates back in the end of 2004.

Now, I hope all of you here have heard about an economic phenomenon called inflation - the process where governments inflate money supply making your dollars buy less. Very few know that for the past decade or so the government has been massaging the official inflation numbers to make them appear lower - this allows them to make fewer and fewer payments on inflation adjusted liabilities such as social security. However, they still publish all the numbers one needs to calculate the actual inflation, and some people have been doing that, look for example here:
http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/data
Notice how inflation has been running steadily at about 10% for the last few years. Today, the engineers who drafted the 100$ plan in the end of 2004 / beginning of 2005, should expect the cost to be 100*1.1*1.1*1.1 or roughly 135 dollars.
That already would take a lot of sensationalism out of the story. However, let's not stop here. Remember, the real culprit behind inflation is the money supply, and consumer inflation is usually the latest to price rising party. The money supply (as you may have noticed from previous link) has been running at 14% annually, causing serious mischief in prices of things like energy (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/energy/index.htm) or metals (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/metals/welcome_to_the_page_about_copper_futures.htm) - both are important for making technology.
Just for the sake of an example, let's trivialize the problem a little, and say that to make a laptop you need to spend 60% of your budget on metals, and 40% on energy (it's wrong, but I am just making an example). What would you expect to happen to the price of such laptop according the charts I linked to? Well, it would go up from 100$ to slightly over 200$.

So what is the real story here, engineers screwing up their designs, or governments inflating away the buying power of the dollar making the same thing cost twice more over 3 years?
Look at my links, do your research, decide for yourself.

The biggest differences between this and some other low-power laptop (15W) is:

1. Open source from the ground up, based on fedora core 6.
2. Open firmware.
3. It was going to have a hand crank to power it, which would have kept battery disposal from becoming a problem, but that idea was dropped. It's still neat in the sense that it accepts a wider voltage range than anything I've ever seen, but if the battery fails, replacing it will be a major cost for some people.
4. Agressive power management.
5. Includes a 640x480 video camera. (If this had a hand crank, it would have a calling as "field equipment".)
6. No hard disk, only 1G of flash.
7. Privacy issues?

One of the most surprising things is this, from here.

As a matter of practicality and given the necessity to enhance performance and reliability while containing costs, XO is not burdened by the bloat of excess code, the "featureitis" that is responsible for much of the clumsiness, unreliability, and expense of many modern laptops. XO will start up in an instant and move briskly through its operations. We accomplish this by focusing on only those features that children need for learning.

If true, there's hope that this thing will compare favorably to its competition, which probably doesn't share this philosophy.

It's a much better use of Ryan's precious time to work on porting games to the open source OLPC platform which will bring new educational games to millions of kids, instead of working on closed source software like Valve which will only bring old violent games to a few thousand hard core Linux fanatics.

-Don

Sounds like something gramma could handle.

"There are no software applications in the traditional sense on the laptop. The laptop focuses children around "activities." This is more than a new naming convention; it represents an intrinsic quality of the learning experience we hope the children will have when using the laptop. Activities are distinct from applications in their foci--collaboration and expression--and their implementation--journaling and iteration."

http://www.laptop.org/laptop/interface/principles. shtml

I'm surprised there are not more flashdrive based linux boxes available these days.

There will be several million shortly...

# Mass storage: 1024 MiB SLC NAND flash, high-speed flash controller;
# Drives: No rotating media.

From the OLPC Spec

I believe this is one feature of the One Laptop Per Child project. (See also Wikipedia article.)

--
Metagovernment - Government by ALL of the people.

There's not as much corporate sponsorship going on as you think, but your misconceptions are understandable, given that many articles about the OLPC have been taken out of context when posted on Slashdot.

The memory slot (not actual memory) was added not so that the laptop could run Windows, but because the slot would be useful and changes to the design allowed it to be added for minimal cost. The laptop remains unable to run anything like WinXP or Vista, as it still lacks the processing power and basic storage space. See Walter Bender's comments:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:The_OLPC_Wiki#Open_ source.3F

The laptops will still run a modified version of Fedora -- not Windows -- when they are distributed. Microsoft's efforts to run Windows on the laptops are entirely their own initiative. OLPC provided a number of laptops to different companies like Microsoft and Google (in addition to many educational institutions) to encourage development and experimentation, and this is one of the things Microsoft chose to do with their laptop. Everything distributed with the laptops is still entirely open source (with the possible exception of the wireless driver, but that's another story).

As far as processors go, the AMD Geode was chosen for the laptop because it is cheap and has low power consumption. The choice of chip for the initial distribution of laptops has not changed -- it is still the AMD Geode. The recent involvement with Intel applies to the school servers (essentially desktop machines, distributed to each school), not the laptops themselves. Future versions of the laptop and server may have different chips, but the currently planned versions have AMD chips for the laptop and Intel for the server.

That 'plague' has to do with electrolytic capacitors. Please take a look at this image:

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/1/10/Proto-a-front.j pg

Note the near-absence of electrolytic caps, especially the junky through-hole ones you find on your typical motherboard.

From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification:

    Beta Test 3 Systems (BTest-3, or B3)

This build, scheduled for May 2007, is the first to use an updated design for the laptop. Noticeable improvements over BTest-2 include:

        * A faster, lower power processor: the Geode LX-700
                    o 64 KB I/64 KB D of L1 Cache, 128 KB of L2 Cache (vs. 32 KB of L1 cache)
                    o Faster processor and memory clock (433/333 vs. 366/266)
                    o 1.5 W typ. vs. 3 W typ.
                    o Much better graphics processor, including support for rotated blits and depth conversion

Technically, all official builds are x86 builds, since the OLPC uses an x86 AMD Geode chip, but these wouldn't help you because they are tailored for the OLPC hardware and don't include support for much else. You can, however, download a general-purpose LiveCD from the OLPC wiki, but it is very out-of-date:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCd

The preferred way to try out the OLPC software is to download one of the virtual machine images and run it in an emulator like qemu or VMWare:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO

And if you have a Linux system and are feeling adventurous, you can try building the OLPC software from source:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Setting_Up_a_Sugar_Devel opment_Environment_on_*IX_OSes

Keep in mind that the system is under heavy development over the next couple months. If something doesn't work one day, it may well be fixed in the next day's image.

Technically, all official builds are x86 builds, since the OLPC uses an x86 AMD Geode chip, but these wouldn't help you because they are tailored for the OLPC hardware and don't include support for much else. You can, however, download a general-purpose LiveCD from the OLPC wiki, but it is very out-of-date:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCd

The preferred way to try out the OLPC software is to download one of the virtual machine images and run it in an emulator like qemu or VMWare:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO

And if you have a Linux system and are feeling adventurous, you can try building the OLPC software from source:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Setting_Up_a_Sugar_Devel opment_Environment_on_*IX_OSes

Keep in mind that the system is under heavy development over the next couple months. If something doesn't work one day, it may well be fixed in the next day's image.

Technically, all official builds are x86 builds, since the OLPC uses an x86 AMD Geode chip, but these wouldn't help you because they are tailored for the OLPC hardware and don't include support for much else. You can, however, download a general-purpose LiveCD from the OLPC wiki, but it is very out-of-date:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCd

The preferred way to try out the OLPC software is to download one of the virtual machine images and run it in an emulator like qemu or VMWare:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO

And if you have a Linux system and are feeling adventurous, you can try building the OLPC software from source:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Setting_Up_a_Sugar_Devel opment_Environment_on_*IX_OSes

Keep in mind that the system is under heavy development over the next couple months. If something doesn't work one day, it may well be fixed in the next day's image.

Oh, gee, you're so right, I bet no one thought of that.

There are numerous benefits to this... sure you could take the money and buy food and / or build a better school, however I don't believe this is the same thing.

You don't need access to the internet to be able to stimulate interest and growth. Having grown up in South Africa where internet was (and still is) very limited, my first computer had NO internet access (thereafter BBS's came along).

I had learned to program my first machine (a ZX Spectrum 48k) using Basic, and then machine code.

I'm sure there are numerous kids with the interest and aptitude to become successful if given the opportunity and the tools. Even if just 2% of these kids end up becoming interested in engineering and / or other disciplines, its a stepping stone for the country as a whole, as their kids will follow in their footsteps.

Just because *you* could not learn anything from your computer without it being connected to the internet, doesn't mean others can't.

FYI... these PCS come preloaded with software that allow programming out the box

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components

Nope. Scroll down to pledgebank.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Retail

For a remarkably large value of "1". According to One Laptop Per Child http://laptop.org/, it should increase to more than a billion in the next 10 years, for the accepted value of a billion, and an unknown base for the "10".

... it's a waste of money compared to better causes like ... FEEDING or MEDICINE ...

You have to remember that philanthropy is often done by people with passion. Nicholas Negroponte was the co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, so naturally he's passionate about computers. One thing about the nature of passion is that one who is passionate wants to instill the same passion in others. Negroponte has passion about computers (and money, which definitely helps), so let him express his philanthropy as he wants. So perhaps the question shouldn't be, "Why isn't Negroponte giving food and medicine?" but rather "Why isn't there some other rich philanthropist who is passionate about feeding kids and making sure they have decent medical care?" There's no shortage of rich men.

Also, let's face it: giving food and medicine (a) just isn't sexy to the press and so doesn't garner support easily and (b) giving food and medicine is a never-ending job. Unlike giving a kids a laptop, you have to feed them three times a day every day. Even the most passionate philanthropist would likely burn out.

Another thing you need to consider is the potential for kids to rise above their situation. Feeding kids just makes them not hungry; the results of giving kids access to the internet is unknown buy potentially unbounded.

Consider what was done in Born into Brothels: poor children of prostitutes were given cameras. Could the kids have used more/better food/medicine? Of course. But what resulted from the cameras was (a) art and, for a few children, (b) a way out of their bleak station in life from their art and notoriety is garnered. As useful as food and medicine might be, it offers no hope of escaping their bleak lives. Who knows what kids might accomplish with laptops? Wouldn't it be interesting to find out?

The future of desktop computing is 24/7 thin clients/home servers using less than 10W and passive cooling without fans, because for a typical 300W desktop 24/7 system you probably would be paying $100/month, more than a thousand a year. This is enough for 90% of users, those who are not after the latest/greatest 3D horsing power, those whose necessities are supplied with an onboard graphics chip such as Intel X3100 or even less. You would be surprised with the amount of computing power such devices have nowadays.

They do not use hard disks, but flash memory/pendrives as storage for the operating system and homedir, and are passively cooled, so they do not use fans, which are noisy and spend more energy. Massive storage (TBs) can be added if necessary, each one using an extra ~15W. A small list with some of them:

1) Linutop: http://www.linutop.com/
It comes with xubuntu, 280euros.
~6W, AMD Geode LX700 433MHz, 256MB RAM, Audio, 100baseT, 4xUSB2.0

2) Zonbu Zonbox: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9073106297.html
It comes with Gentoo Linux, $250.
~15W, VIA C7 1.2GHz, 512MB RAM, Audio, 100baseT, 6xUSB2.0

3) Mini Linux PC: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS6372429785.html
Not sure about which Linux flavor it comes with, but if it runs Linux, it runs Ubuntu, $99.
~5W, 200MHz x86-compatible, 128MB RAM, Audio, 100baseT, 3xUSB2.0

4) OLPC: http://www.laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml
Not yet available, but specs are fine for a home server + external storage, ~$100.
~2W (!), AMD Geode LX-700@0.8W 433 Mhz, 256MB RAM, Audio, LinuxBIOS (!), wireless connection, 3xUSB2.0.

Many others: http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4923746399.html

1. This has nothing to do with the OLPC Project submitting to the terms of the Fedora Project Individual Contributor License Agreement. It also has NOTHING to do with the GPL. These don't matter, period. The OLPC project is run by Americans, in Cambridge from what I gather. This means that the OLPC project was already subject to US export regulations, regardless of any license agreement or what have you.
2. Yes, the hardware is also subject to US export regulations
3. The Fedora Project Wiki entry for Legal/Export is outdated and inaccurate. For example, Iraq is still listed under "Embargoed Destinations". Iraq is not embargoed (*somehow* that changed when we invaded)
4. There are two US agencies that are important when discussing the Cuba sanctions/embargo. The Department of Commerce and the Treasury Department.
   • Here's a nice 6 page overview of the US embargo of Cuba from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (Treasury). Notice the text stating:
     To whom do these sanctions regulations apply?All U.S. citizens and permanent residents wherever they are located, all people and organizations physically in the United States, and all branches and subsidiaries of U.S. organizations throughout the world
   • And here's a nice overview from the Bureau of Industry and Security (Commerce) discussing exports and reexports to Cuba. Note that you will need to obtain a license from BIS for shipping something like an Xbox or OLPC to Cuba. Also note that there is a general policy of denial in place (meaning it's unlikely that these exports will be authorized by BIS)
5. No, you can't be a "middle man" or you'd be violating US export control regulations. There are these pesky things called General Prohibitions that, you know, "prohibit" certain things. General Prohibition 10 in Part 736 of the Export Administration Regulations states:
   You may not sell, transfer, export, reexport, finance, order, buy, remove, conceal, store, use, loan, dispose of, transfer, transport, forward, or otherwise service, in whole or in part, any item subject to the EAR and exported or to be exported with knowledge that a violation of the Export Administration Regulations, the Export Administration Act or any order, license, License Exception, or other authorization issued thereunder has occurred, is about to occur, or is intended to occur in connection with the item

In the case of Cuba, I think the fastest way to eliminate the current regime is to remove all restrictions on trade and travel.

It's a good idea, just the tech hurdles and economic hurdles are awesome, let alone the political ones, as in, the government and big biz will not like this idea *at all*. But..it is something to contemplate as the internet-as-we-know-it-today gets turned into a series of pay per view walled gardens. . The OLPC machine has built in automagical mesh networking, I'd say look there for tech clues to begin your peoples' net. FON is somewhat what you are looking for that is out there now.

I'm working with EA and the OLPC project, to make the original version of SimCity Classic open source. It's currently going through EA's QA process right now, and the legal department is working on their end of the deal. This sort of stuff always takes a long time to complete, but Will Wright wants it to happen, so I'm optimistic it will.

Once all the QA and legal stuff is done, we're going to release an updated version for the OLPC of the original X11/TCL/Tk version I developed for Unix about 15 years ago, which supports cooperative multi player mode (voting, chat, shared whiteboard, etc), and I've heavily optimized it so it runs really fast. After it's released, then we're going to adapt it to the OLPC's "Sugar" user interface, which is based on GTK and Cairo. SimCity will be scriptable in Python, of course! We'll rewrite the multi player mode on top of Sugar's standard networking libraries, instead of directly opening multiple X11 connections, as it currently does.

Some ideas about SimCity on the OLPC:
SimCity for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child): Applying Papert's Ideas About Constructionist Education and Teaching Kids to Program.

I'm already developing some of the software components required to port SimCity to the OLPC, including pie menus and a tile engine:
Pie Menus for OLPC Sugar User Interface, in Python with GTK, Cairo and Pango modules.
[OLPC-Games] Efficient general purpose tile engine, and a cellular automata machine.

-Don

> It these an emulator or sdk of something one could use to try and develop for hardware involved here ?

http://wiki.laptop.org/

You can do that now with a virtual machine image (see the wiki). I have been able to boot it in qemu and even developed my own game for it using straight-up python & pygtk. However, my game can also run on any box that has python & pygtk, it is not taking advantage of any OLPC-specific software or hardware. One advantage of having everybody in a single physical location is that things like the built-in networking and cameras can be tested out.
    A little OT, but I think that the interface is generally pretty good, but at least so far in the beta builds the file-selection dialogs for opening up text & drawings are still the (absolutely atrocious) Gnome defaults that are made even worse because the limited screen real estate on OLPC means the fields are too small to even see properly. Making a simplified and OLPC-friendly file dialog would be a major improvement.

Ostensibly the "One Laptop Per Child" thing was meant to provide computing access to underprivileged youths. Now there's competition in the same market and somehow that's bad? If Intel strong-arms the OLPC project into oblivion but continues to provide the same "philanthropic", so to speak, service, don't the children still benefit?

Why is dropping to root a failure for this laptop?

You need to read the bitfrost spec. "root" isn't a viable security mechanism for modern computing, much as you like it. It doesn't distribute, and doesn't offer the multiple levels of security that are required in the OLPC types of deployment. There likely isn't an expert around who can "root" around problems. Instead, OLPC has a well-defined security model that makes sense for its deployment environment.

two systems designed to do basically the same thing

The OLPC team is at least considering this: see here, here and here. To summarize those links, it's a very green laptop, there are strong incentives to not simply throw the laptops away, and plans for recycling are (apparently) in the works.

The OLPC team is at least considering this: see here, here and here. To summarize those links, it's a very green laptop, there are strong incentives to not simply throw the laptops away, and plans for recycling are (apparently) in the works.

The OLPC team is at least considering this: see here, here and here. To summarize those links, it's a very green laptop, there are strong incentives to not simply throw the laptops away, and plans for recycling are (apparently) in the works.

Updating my own post: it's a Geode from AMD not a Via. But that does not change my argument. Indeed it only makes it worse for intel.

It'd be one thing if Intel were buying their way into this "market" for whatever reason (cheaper machines = more kids benefitting), but from the article the Intel machine is in fact more expensive so they've had to resort to sending in the spin droids to try to kill the OLPC. Bottom line is Intel prefers less kids with Intel CPUs than more kids with AMD CPUs.

One interesting point is that the OLPC runs Linux while the Intel Classmate runs Linux or Windows XP Professional + Microsoft Office - obviously being provided essentially free by Microsoft. It's hard to see how Intel/Microsoft are doing impoverished developing countries a favor by trying to get kids hooked on Windows vs free software that as adults they'd actually be able to afford.

http://www.laptop.org/laptop/software/specs.shtml

http://www.classmatepc.com/classmatepc-system-soft ware.html

Professor Negroponte says Intel has distributed marketing literature to governments with titles such as "the shortcomings of the One Laptop per Child approach", which outline the supposedly stronger points of the Classmate.

Mr Barrett told CBS: "Someone at Intel was comparing the Classmate PC with another device being offered in the marketplace. That's the way our business works." ...

Countries have until 31 May to place their orders for the first batch [of OLPCs] and will be able to purchase lots of 250,000.

They will initially cost $176 (£90) but the eventual aim is to sell the machine to governments of developing countries for $100 (£50).

Intel says it already has orders for "thousands" of Classmates, which currently cost over $200 (£100).

Like the OLPC machine, Intel expects the price to eventually fall.

Which would you rather use?

to be fair, according to this writeup, at present (with the power management features still non-implemented) the OLPC only lasts 2-4 hours on a battery charge, (depending on screen use IIRC). Current power consumption is around 8 watts on 'BTest-2', with the target consumption being 2 watts. I don't doubt they'll sort out such things before the design is finalized though, and actually I was a little surprised to see this article after reading the writeup I linked above, there's still some real serious bugs on those machines.

> The "500" is part of the marketing name. In no way does the core run at 500 MHz.

According to the specifications is uses LX-700, which runs at 433MHz (more info here). Not far from 500MHz.

Core electronics:
* CPU: AMD Geode LX-700@0.8W
* CPU clock speed: 433 MHz

XO Specs

A truly visionary project that might change education on a global scale. If they succeed, the XO-computer and/or Sugar will be as natural in the learning process as books, pen and paper are today. I realy belive it is the way to go in education. It is open source and much much more. Check out: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41?gcli d=CK7El-aP4IsCFSayEAodJSKiYA , http://wiki.laptop.org/ and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Gui delines

A truly visionary project that might change education on a global scale. If they succeed, the XO-computer and/or Sugar will be as natural in the learning process as books, pen and paper are today. I realy belive it is the way to go in education. It is open source and much much more. Check out: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41?gcli d=CK7El-aP4IsCFSayEAodJSKiYA , http://wiki.laptop.org/ and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Gui delines

Slightly offtopic regarding the OLPC. Did it occur to you that f.e. the Kohjinshas http://www.kohjinsha.com/ and rebranded Cathenas http://www.dataevolution.com/cathena_cx_info.htm are almost nothing more than the OLPC http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)#Geo de_LX with different storage subsystems, consumergrade casings and different, albeit small displays? Intended initial cost for the OLPC was about 100 USD, now it reached about 170 USD. Compare that with the price for the Kohjinshas. Do some calculations for the difference between small formfactor but larger capacity HDDs and Flash based media, and the different displays. Where would be the difference in (mass)manufacturing costs between a more rugged case which is intended for being handled by childs hands under hard conditions and a case which is more appealing to geeks? Seems like someone has a great win as spin-off from the OLPC for hardware which has been commercially unsuccessful so far. Should i feel f*beep*ed by lacking consumerfriendly (pricewise) availability for this interesting stuff? They have cryptosupport similar to VIAs Padlock integrated and supported by Linux. I just want these boards in Mini/Nano/Pico-ITX for no more than say about 80 USD, as an alternative to VIA EPIA which is overrated, i think. :-)

To be fair, this article is not:

- based on information from Negroponte
- based on a press release
- initiated by the OLPC

You're seeing it because someone at Ars Technica thought that articles covering an earlier media event were incorrect, asked someone at OLPC about it, and then decided the correction was worthy of an article. Microsoft is not even mentioned on the current OLPC news page. As far as the OLPC is concerned, this isn't even on the radar.

They are more concerned with making sure these people can communicate with each other, receive information helpful to their daily lives (like weather)

The OLPC is purely designed to be a teaching tool. That's it. This is the One Laptop Per CHILD program, not One Laptop Per Parent or Per Family. It has nothing to do with adults communicating with each other or checking the weather. It may be able to do that, but that's not what it is designed for. It will also never be a substitute for a real teacher, and is not intended to be. The idea is that teachers will incorporate the OLPC into their curriculum to improve how children learn.

See the website for more info.

The proposed $100 machine will run a Microsoft Windows operating system
True: Microsoft is working on a Windows based system that can be executed on the OLPC laptop. False: There is no strategy change. The OLPC is continuing to develop a Linux-based software set for the laptop in conjunction with Red Hat. But since the OLPC project is open we cannot (and maybe even don't want to) stop other people from developing and supplying alternate software packages.

I see. Apparently you are under the mistaken impression that OLPC intends, or ever even considered for an instant, to include Windows software with the device.

The fact that the (open) device is capable of running Windows or other non-open software in no way implies endorsement of that software by the maker of the device. Your inferrence of some under-the-table collusion between OLPC and Microsoft is unwarranted and unsubstantiated. The projects goals remain clear and emphatic about the platform and software being open.

http://laptop.org/laptop/software/specs.shtml

This is a myth.

This question has been asked and answered in their wiki.

I have been asking this myself. Why not? I once met someone who did exactly this. He organized a group in his church to collect and recycle old computers and give lessons to school dropouts in poor neighborhoods.

However, as the wiki I linked above says, it doesn't scale well. To organize a large scale effort in this way you would need a network of people with talent for organization, technical ability, and interest for helping the needy. It's not easy to find enough people with all of those qualifications.

True: Microsoft is working on a Windows based system that can be executed on the OLPC laptop.
False: There is no strategy change. The OLPC is continuing to develop a Linux-based software set for the laptop in conjunction with Red Hat. But since the OLPC project is open we cannot (and maybe even don't want to) stop other people from developing and supplying alternate software packages.

True: Microsoft is working on a Windows based system that can be executed on the OLPC laptop.
False: There is no strategy change. The OLPC is continuing to develop a Linux-based software set for the laptop in conjunction with Red Hat. But since the OLPC project is open we cannot (and maybe even don't want to) stop other people from developing and supplying alternate software packages.