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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."
Getting OLPC off the ground was a huge undertaking whose backers did not all share the same vision.
The whole point of Sugar was to make the XO a universal, personal educational computing device, free of the cultural barriers and prejudices that are inherent in something like Windows. The people who pursued this vision of OLPC were the idealists.
Then there were, to use a generous term, the pragmatists. They didn't see the use in building a new, universal education platform. To them, the developing world may well have just been millions of children waiting to grow up to work at offshore call centers, and getting them familiar with The Way The World Works was the first priority.
Obviously, the latter won, and to be honest, I don't think their tamer, "more realistic" vision of OLPC will ever make the same mark on the world that a Sugar-powered XO would have.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I don't think sugar was the main problem.
Negroponte couldn't seem to make up his mind on the device. First it was supposed to be small, cheap, and completely open-source/user-modifiable. Part of the point was to make the entire platform a learning experience.
Then the hardware specs started changing to make room for Windows... Why exactly? Who knows... Microsoft wanted a piece of the pie, and Negroponte accommodated them.
But then the device wasn't nearly so cheap, and the entire platform wasn't an open learning experience. The cost lost them a few customers... And the lack of openness lost them a few more...
And the marketing? Horrible.
There are plenty of netbooks out there now... Stuff from MSI and Dell and HP... Some ship with Windows, some ship with Linux... They're selling just fine. There's no reason the XO couldn't have been a successful product.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Part of OLPC had always been that the entire software stack could be modified, and that users could learn about it and share ideas to make their own platform better.
The Afghan girl risks her life learning how to read and write.
It is the basics of a grade school education which transform and modernize a society.
In these simple things are the roots of independence, power and survival.
That is where your focus needs to be.
The geek builds a machine that reflects his own needs and values and thinks that he has created something universal.