OLPC Still Confident despite Numerous Setbacks
By Wilson • Feb 2nd, 2009 • Category: UncategorizedOne Laptop Per Child project, popularly known as OLPC delivered more than 1m XO-1 laptops to the children of developing nations. This project was started with a vision to help the poor young ones. The main aim of the OLPC is to ensure that no child is deprived of quality education just because he cannot afford it.
OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte, who is the founder and chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab. Unfortunately it has been through lots of setbacks in past recent years. In 2007 OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen refused to start a new company called Pixel Qi to support development of XO ideas separately. Later on Walter Bender, the software boss also resigned and recently the OLPC had shed off half of its staff and the remaining 32 members have agreed to a huge pay cut. Perhaps even more threateningly, many commercially made netbooks are now approaching and eclipsing the OLPC’s low cost. Whilst commercial netbooks, such as the Asus Eee PC 701 8G, were already almost as expensive as the OLPC XO laptop, recent developments have netbooks approaching the £100 mark; which is obviously a major threat to the OLPC’s viability
The amazing thing is that despite all this the OLPC stands tall and confident with regards to its vision and operations. Nicholas Negroponte doesn’t sound downhearted. He says, “OLPC should have trimmed sooner. We have since grown stronger. Almost all the cutbacks were in engineering staff related to the in-house support of Sugar, which is far better done in the community. In fact, paying people to do it from within created a degree of control that was unsuitable for real open-source development. There are 600,000 laptops in the field, 250,000 in transit and another 380,000 about to be made, so the total adds up to about 1.2m. Thirty-one countries in 19 languages are the exact statistics. It’s less than I anticipated, but still gratifying.”
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