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Is One Laptop Per Child Winding Down?
An anonymous reader sends this quote from OLPC News about whether the One Laptop Per Child project can expect to continue much longer:
"Here is a question for you: 8 years on, would you recommend anyone start a new deployment with XO-1 laptops? With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face reality. The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project."
A response from OLPC says their mission is "far from over." They add, "OLPC also has outsourced many of the software and development units because the organization is becoming more hardware and OS agnostic, concentrating on its core values – education."
I and a few other volunteers set up a few new deployments just this past January (2014) in Haiti. 8 years on, the XO-1's are still great learning tools. There is still a supply, as a lot of people redonated their "get one," and the laptops themselves seem to last almost forever. Spare parts aren't all that hard to find, and there are dozens if not hundreds of developers and sysadmins still supporting existing deployments, with the more adventurous of us working on new ones.
For anyone interested in starting a new deployment with XO-1's, you can get in touch with us at http://unleashkids.org and we can talk about the details.
I think it's vision is being fulfilled by the Raspberry Pi. Cheap and low power it offers a lot of possibilities for education and seems to fire the imagination and creativity in children.
When I emailed OLPC last year, I didn't expect a response and I didn't get one. Instead, Project Rive's XO laptops came from the Contributors' Program, which is run by volunteers for volunteers. 10 computers go down in someone's suitcase, instead of 10,000 being sent to a government. This "unofficial" effort has long been doing a much better job than the official guys, because we give schools the support they need - from solar setups to curriculum. Unleash Kids launched several programs in Haiti this year. We're using the original XO-1 computers, with new tools like a customized version of Sugar, the XSCE school server, and Internet-in-a-Box. Yep, the computers themselves are still being used years later, and there's a community working to find new uses and users. There's 2.5 million XOs out there, built to last longer than the latest tablet. No matter what happens to the big guys, Unleash Kids and others inspired by the OLPC vision will continue