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

Who are you? Who who? Who who?

[Ihmhi]

Who is Ivan Krstić? Is he related to Little Bobby Tables?

Re:entirely not the problem

[StreetStealth]

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.

sugar wasn't the problem

[Ephemeriis]

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.

OLPC is a success

[Charbax]

Quit posting about OLPC being a failure. It is absolutely not.

Thanks to OLPC, we have soon 50 million netbooks in rich countries.

Thanks to OLPC, children have soon millions of cheap lower power laptops in poor countries.

Thanks to OLPC, the PC/Laptop industry's interpretation of Moore's law has totally been reshaped, every 18month now PC/laptops will be half the price instead of 2x more powerful and with 2x more bloatware.

Sure, I would have been happier, and so would most other Linux geeks if OLPC had shipped 100 million laptops to poor children by now, and not just 1 million units. Reason for that not happening yet in multi-hundred million scales though are several:

1. Intel will do anything it can not to be killed off by a non-profit laptop technology revolution. Including abusing of monopolistic situations and corrupting politicians.

2. AMD is not much interested in helping OLPC succeed in lowering the cost of laptops and PCs. Lower cost also means less profits and margins for AMD, and AMD has enough problems with profits and margins as it is.

Looking forward, to reach those 100 million poor children sooner rather than later:

1. OLPC needs to find an alternative to AMD as soon as possible. VIA is planned for XO-1.5 which could hopefully ship a few millions of units in a few months time, if VIA supports this move of OLPC creating a cheaper and lower power market using their processor. XO-1.5 could reach the $150 pricepoint soon and enable dozens of commercial netbooks using the VIA processor and also copying on the way OLPC is using the VIA processor.

2. OLPC needs to implement the worlds best ARM processor based laptops for XO-2 working with Google to implement the so called Chrome OS on those. Cloud computing can work also for places without stable internet access, HTML5 supports offline web apps and offline databases. OLPC needs to push Google to make it work on WiFi Mesh networks as well. XO-2 can start at $100 when released and reach the $50 price point, when manufactured using any of half a dozen ARM processor companies chips. All of TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale, Nvidia and Samsung, all those ARM processors should fit in the XO-2 design. Competition will bring the prices down faster.

Re:True

[westlake]

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.

Re:Feature creep killed the XO

[mrcparker]

I think that I must be the only person who actually purchased an XO, because all of the reasons given for the poor sales are not pointing out the one problem that the OLPC XO had on launch: it was (and still is) sluggish. It is a pain in the ass to use, since doing things like reading PDFs is slow as hell.

My OLPC is sitting in my office unused because, as much as I wanted to use it to read PDFs and browse the web, Sugar is slow and doing things like moving from page-to-page in the reader take a looong time.

On the development side, did the Sugar APIs ever get mature enough that the documentation was stable? Is it really ready for third parties to write software in Sugar without having to worry that large sections of their code will have to change on the nest upgrade? Looking right now at the docs, there are still parts of the code that do not have stable APIs.

How can you take a sluggish device with moving APIs and expect to sell it to countries on a large scale? Will governments really be willing to spend millions of dollars on something that is clearly unfinished design-wise and second-rate?

Microsoft and Intel did not kill the OLPC. The OLPC was enough to kill itself.