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New President for OLPC Organization
haroldag writes "After Walter Bender's resignation as president of OLPC, Charles Kane enters to take his place as the new boss. Kane says 'The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible. Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn't matter. It's about getting it into kids' hands. Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for.'"
The OLPC is never only about getting technology to children, at least that's not what I heard when it started. It was about building up the poorer nations with education and technology, not just "get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible."
It was a mission to improve these nations and communities by making them competitive and independent.
I guess Microsoft's billions can corrupt anything they want. It's now just about building markets for Windows.
FUCK YOU OLPC!
I got my XO laptop.
I have ported Ubuntu Hardy on it. It easily runs Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
I am working on an easy to install version, and missing controls for screen/power/...
I went as far as making a Ubuntu-ish green gtk and icons theme to match UI colors with laptop controls.
I am going to add a way to easily switch between screens running Sugar and "mainstream" window manager.
This is pretty much the most "mainstream" laptop configuration imaginable. For any practical use on this laptop, educational or otherwise, it is already superior to anything that would involve Windows. Heck, I am POSTING FROM IT!
If the goal is anything other than spreading the disease that is Windows, they can just take this configuration -- and I am willing to help in improving it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
When the OLPC was first announced, there was tremendous support for it..but you couldn't get one. The OLPC project basically said eat manure, you won't get one no matter what. Then, as time went on and about zero "sales", they reluctantly had the 100% markup limited run G1G1 and even then they couldn't fill their orders, people are still waiting for product. They are approaching governments asking them to commit to a million units, before they had anything to show them. Does not compute.
Economies of scale and getting the dang things on the market would have worked.
Devs don't want to develop when they can't even buy one! In the meantime, asus took the same basic idea, just built one and put it on the market, and selling like proverbial hotcakes. OLPC might have had a few smart people involved, but had no idea of how to actually sell anything, and now they are stuck and have to go hat in hand groveling to microsoft for some peanuts handouts. How freaking embarrassing for them.
All those dipsquat developing world poohbahs would have been falling over themselves lining up with big orders and checkbooks if the thing had hit the generic international market and taken off like the asus, and they wouldn't have cared if it was "windows" or not then. Envy is a powerful force in this world. Look at Iphone mania, black market and gray market is just as strong as white market there. Why? Word of mouth, buzz, envy, "gottahaveit"-itis. The XO folks simply messed up trying to sell a lot of units *because they refused to sell any units* unless you bought like a buhzillion of them. Crazy! Nuts! They could have sold millions by now and any developer problems would have been self correcting then.