Ivan Krstić Says Negroponte's Wrong About Sugar and OLPC

Not many days ago, we mentioned ZDNet's interview with Nicholas Negroponte, in which Negroponte had some harsh things to say about Sugar and its connection to the slower-than-hoped uptake of the XO. Ivan Krstic (formerly head of the OLPC's security innovative subsystem) responded to Negroponte's claims, which he says are "nonsense." Among other things, he mentions that Sugar "was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux."

Comments

Please, whatever

[coryking]

I'm not a big fan of Negroponte, but both Intel and Microsoft went out of their way to kill this project

This is only according to those stricken with Linus's so-called Microsoft-Hater Disease. It is my understanding that both of those companies *and* apple offered to hook them up with stuff and were declined. Why? Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd. That would make their Slashdot Karma go down. So rather than except the offer, he declined and when all the other players wisely decided to make their own products, rather than realizing his mistake he choose to shift blame and pin it on those "big evil corporations trying to screw the little guy".

If they'd had any heart at all, they'd have said, "Great! How can we help?" and turned it into a big PR bonus for themselves.

By my recolection, they did say "how can we help" and were declined. The OLPC guys tryed to turn it into their own PR bonus.

In other words, OLPC was its own worst enemy. It had no clearly defined goal. Was its goal playing politics for Free Software? Was it playing high-stakes international politics with so-called developing nations? Was it a laptop company? Was it an education company? Who knows. They sure didn't.

If I was on that board, I would have tried my hardest to force them to pick one and go with that. Obviously they aren't a political football for Free Software, so they should go with whatever OS their customers want installed. Now the question is should they be a hardware manufacturer or an education provider? If they are hardware? Build their own rig from scratch and install Linux, OSX or Windows and let others do the software. If they are education? Outsource the engineering and work on sugar and good software. Doing all at once while wasting time worrying about their slashdot karma was what did them in.

Saying Microsoft and Intel is solely to blame is letting your disease take control. Not good.

Re:Please, whatever

[TheRaven64]

Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd

If you believe this, then you're missing the point of the OLPC project. Building the product was only originally intended to be a demonstration. The idea of having open designs was to encourage other groups to produce their own versions. If the Indian government, for example, had decided they wanted to build them using native production capacity then they could take the designs, take the software, modify either in any way they wanted, and start producing them. While having OS X on them might have been nice in the short term, it would have made this impossible.

Having Intel produce competing devices wasn't a problem, it was an original project aim (at least, according to the talk I saw from one of the project instigators a few years back). They wanted Intel to undercut them. They wanted Chinese companies to produce clones. And they wanted these clones to be as good as possible, copying as much of their code as possible, because the aim of the project was to get laptops to children, not to make a profit or ship a certain number of units.