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Negroponte Offers OLPC Technology For India's $35 Tablet
angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government's planned $35 tablet. In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology."
The XO was never about "shipping products people could afford and wanted to buy". It was about giving children in developing nations an open platform on which to learn computing, and have access to digitized knowledge resources. Not everyone is out to make a profit, some people just want to do good things.
If no one has your back, time to move your back.
Can somebody explain why India needs a $35 tablet and the rest of us don't?
What does it benefit from this "attention"? Assuming India's press agent is actually the one behind this bogus story, which I doubt, what good does it do India to have this kind of story on obscure tech blogs?
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Cheap and/or free" to whom?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think you're missing the point of OLPC - it's not so affluent people can buy lots of cheap computers, it's to offer access to the less privileged in the world. If the way to do that is to provide mechanisms to prevent these being sold off on the second hand market by corrupt governments or individuals, or to protect the western markets of those who have generously contributed/discounted hardware and software to the project then that's a necessary evil that nevertheless allows some good to be done.
If "...everything [olpc] do is open source..." then why do we have an article saying Negroponte has offered their knowledge? It's already out there, open, right? RIGHT?
It was a sellout in the sense that the project appeared to leverage open source to gain a favorable agreement with MS, who didn't want to license copies of XP for $3, but submitted to the pressure of doing so when the project began to gather interest from the media and general public. What began as a goal of introducing computer and internet learning to children with no previous exposure, turned into a power grab for Microsoft. Had the Bill Gates Foundation offered unrestricted grants to the project or Microsoft approached them early in development asking how it can help, people may have a different opinion of the subject.