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Walter Bender Resigns From OLPC

Posted by timothy on from the shiny-but-not-an-ass dept.

westlake writes "Walter Bender, the former executive director of MIT's Media Lab, and, in many ways, the tireless workhorse and public face of OLPC, has resigned from OLPC after being reorganized and sidetracked into insignificance. The rumor mill would have it that 'constructionism as children [learn] learning' is being replaced by a much less romantic view of the XO's place in the classroom and XO's tech in the marketplace."

2 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. It looks by esocid · · Score: 5, Interesting
    like Bender was kind of forced to resign since all of his responsibilities were absorbed into the other 4 restructured areas. Since January the OLPC has lost three top execs, one of whom was asked to stop collaborating with Bender. Something seems a little fishy with this operation now.

    In an interview with BusinessWeek in early March, OLPC Chairman Negroponte said OLPC was "doing almost impossible things," and that the organization needed to be managed "more like Microsoft." He said OLPC was reorganizing into four departments and looking for a CEO to lead the nonprofit.
    --
    Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
  2. Re:Sadly, no... by legutierr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The software stack may be questionable, but the hardware is brilliant. The software stack is actually very cool and innovative. Unfortunately, it is also way too ambitious for the distribution timeline that OLPC has. It tries to reinvent the filesystem and all the standard WIMP GUI conventions, even while implementing everything in *Python*. On top of that, almost every element of the software stack (browser, word processor, etc.) is either implemented from scratch, or re-implemented in Python on top of a low-level branch of FOSS code like gecko or AbiWord.

    Sugar is a worthwhile project. Unfortunately, it is not yet stable (memory leaks, etc), the kinks of the completely re-imagined user experience have not been worked out, and not every "activity" that is needed to provide a complete user experience exists.

    I hope that Sugar is not dead, because when that thing actually starts working...(famous last words?) More importantly, I hope that OLPC makes some very clear and unambiguous statements regarding the future and the status of Sugar, because it needs a strong developer community to survive, and I sure as hell am not going to write anything for it if it is completely abandoned. What a waste it would be, after so much good work.