Slashdot Mirror
A View From Inside the OLPC Project
icknay writes "Here's an interesting rant on the OLPC from someone who worked there, including: 'The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning — that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open — with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable. Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely over-constrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning.' I have an OLPC, and the OS itself seems quite unfinished. I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever."
Forget Sugar, yea its great and all, but the point of the OLPC is learning. Learning requires freedom.
Windows is not "free," and I don't mean price, and I mean freedom. Putting Windows on OLPC is nothing more than a marketing move by Microsoft. Not to help kids, but to ensure they become customers. Not giving them books, selling the subscriptions. Not teaching them to farm, but making them sharecroppers.
I think plopping a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop on the OLPC would be a mistake: those desktops work poorly on small screens, and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh).
I think there's a middle ground, though: reuse the Gnome desktop infrastructure but replace the window manager with something simpler that prevents the usual beginner mistakes (losing windows behind each other, moving windows off-screen, etc.).
As for Windows on OLPC, I don't get it. Even if you run Windows+Sugar on the OLPC, you won't be able to install commercial software or commercial drivers with it, Windows books won't apply, and realistically you won't be able to run Microsoft's development tools on the OLPC either. But you will alienate lots of OLPC contributors, and you'll saddle yourself with an OS over which OLPC has no control, and Microsoft secretly probably just wants to kill the whole project anyway.
It's an old military saying, and it's right. By far the most damning bits in his article don't deal with Sugar, Windows or anything else- they deal with the utter and total lack of planning on the part of the deployment folks. (Err, folk) The fact that they had virtually no plan, no infrastructure and no supply chain management indicates to me that they were simply not living in the real world- any Army 2LT could have sat down with them and explained how they were about to fail. How you get to a point where you have a quarter of a million pieces of hardware sitting around with no coherent way to get them to the people who actually need them is beyond me. Why didn't they hire a pile of old brigade S4s? You know, folks who actually have experience getting stuff to people out in the middle of nowhere?
I've been tremendously disappointed by the entire project- the goals were wonderful, the hardware ended up pretty nice, the software has ended up pretty meh, but the overall project seems to be run by pie-in-the-sky idealists, Open Source fanatics and others for whom the real world is a place they only visit from time to time.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Well, I respectfully submit that the worldview favored by Microsoft actively inhibits learning. As a blindingly mundane example: Make an OS (Windows) which uses filename extensions to divine metadata about certain files (bad, but we'll let that slide for the moment). Next, release a version of said OS which has a default UI setting to hide these filename extensions from the user. This very demonstrably inhibits learning -- even the casual user picks up fairly quickly on things like ".txt" and ".exe" -- and gives people a distorted picture due to the missing information. That, in turn, increases confusion (why are there 4 things called "Setup" in this folder, why do they have different icons and which one do I click?) and paves the way for some of the the crudest exploits (somebadvirus.doc.exe) simply by dumbing down the user. Not only has the prevailing approach by the monopoly software vendor actively inhibited learning, but the net result of that has been several iterations of malware which Just Didn't Need To Happen.
How can you develop a culture of innovation when you promote a mindset which discourages tinkering? Sorry, but in this case half a loaf is worse than no loaf at all. People like Krsti should at least be able to notice this bias in proprietary operating systems and applications. He makes enough reasonable points that it's even more important not to let him off the hook for something like this.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
The cost of developing it aside, what is the problem with having the ideas "presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm," when you're giving the machines to communities in which the per capita rate of computer ownership is practically nil?
Did you even bother to read the rest of the article? He doesn't even want XP on the OLPC. What he wants is some focus on the application usability in order to further constructivist learning, regardless of the operating system underneath. The damn thing ships with Squeak, the apps are written in python, and they SHOULD manage to run on any platform.
I think most people read about a page in, then rushed back to slashdot to muster their defense of Free Software and Fight The Good Fight, and well, pretty much proved his point: OLPC's mission is being lost by people who care more about meta-issues than either the learning mission (enabled by the software, not really the kernel) or the ongoing viability of the project itself (deployments need support!)
Peru may soon be stuck with 40,000 doorstops. Maybe I'll go take a look at Sugar and see if any of the ideas are worth lifting for a groove-like P2P network.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Presumably you're unable to deploy 40,000 laptops in Peru without backing or support from either other NGOs or the Peruvian government. He simply said that there was only one staff member dedicated to deployment. Perhaps their job was to coordinate a much larger pool of non-OLPC staff and volunteers. Without knowing the scale of OLPC staffing or the support from Peru they got, it's difficult to determine if this situation was really so poorly managed.
The whole point of XP on XO is that Microsoft cannot stand up commercially if it ever becomes generally accepted knowledge that there are other O/Ss for small computers which work just as well, if not better than Microsoft products. This is what really gives Bill Gates and Steve Balmer serious laundry problems during the day and horrendous dreams at night. They just cannot allow that to happen.
Where the OLPC people are really in la-la land is thinking that the pupils and their teachers are going to be able to produce the course/learning software modules for themselves. The first world has failed spectacularly in that department, I'd really love to think the third world is going to be able to show up the first world as a bunch of ninnies in this regard, but I fear not.
After watching my son's schools futzing around with both desktop and laptop machines, in my not so humble opinion, laptops in primary schools are a complete waste of time, money and effort, and of very questionable value in secondary ones. Useful for teachers to keep records and to produce teaching materials, but for the pupil's use, no.
It matters not one jot who wrote either the GUI or the underlying O/S, because that's al hidden under the course-ware, which is what counts.
And if you can't see the difference between frustratingly banging your head against a keyboard to get Linux to run properly and learning something new every day, then you're not really seeing with very clear eyes, I don't think.
:(
Frustrating the end user so that they think that the system is nothing but a frustrating, annoying piece of crap is not a very good way to get people to work with it. Especially not the people who give up quickly because they would rather be trying to figure out how to get potable water instead of how to compile a web browser.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7