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Is One Laptop Per Child Winding Down?

Posted by Soulskill on from the still-waiting-on-one-steam-machine-per-child dept.

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."

3 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Winding down? by mbone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hate to be snarky, but did it ever wind up?

    1. Re:Winding down? by khasim · · Score: 5, Informative

      Initially, yes. Go with the least expensive hardware possible and a tiny Linux installation and get them out to people who can learn from them.

      Getting that hardware price-point was difficult. But they got close.

      Then they decided that it needed to run some form of Windows.

      The End.

  2. The OLPC Underground by zwazo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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