I don’t think Negroponte appreciates how big the open source community was in the first year’s G1G1 program. I only know a few people (including myself) who have an OLPC, but we are all Linux geeks. Unfortunately the One Laptop Foundation now has the reputation of being turncoat to the community. There is still a lot of great activity, but now when it is mentioned on Slashdot there are a lot of comments about how disappointing the Windows move was. Perhaps unfair, but that’s how reputations work.

Why split the story across 4 pages?

And why split in the middle of a sentence!?!?

Alienating the community is what’s crippled the OLPC. Sure, that might be more perceived than real but as Richard says, perception is what counts.

Unless they manage to get the community back onside, the OLPC is an interesting piece of history. I hope the sunlight readable displays make their way onto other computers but apart from that, I don’t really care what happens to them.

Nick Negroponte killed the OLPC movement. 100% of OLPC’s support infrastructure is volunteer-based, and OLPC deliberately keeps them in the dark about everything. Bug reports get marked invalid if they’re not filed by an OLPC insider. Serious, crippling wifi problems have gone unresolved for years (in many cases, even untriaged) while they focus on supporting CD-ROM booting for Windows. The Windows-centric BIOS emulation routines are closed-source and under tight NDA. Sugar sucks because nobody bothers to fix it; they just identify one or two problem areas a year and completely rewrite everything. The stylus part of the touchpad has never worked. They never addressed the stuck-keys problem. Spare parts are expensive and hard to acquire. They ship the things locked-down securitywise and expect users to manually enter things into a website and wait days for permission to install other operating systems. The rationale for that last bit is “the G1G1 users are our test bed.”

Dozens of support volunteers have dropped out because the support crew is expected to handle basically all of the public relations, even though they don’t know anything and aren’t authorized to speak for OLPC. Hundreds of e-mails from people willing to help go unanswered and are eventually deleted because OLPC fundamentally doesn’t give a damn about anyone who isn’t a direct employee of the company.

The last handful of companies that Chuck Kane ran were all sold off or put under soon after he took the reins. OLPC has an undisclosed number of NDAs with Microsoft, Marvell, Quanta, and other companies. They ignore offers of help from major open-source figures, and then complain about how long it takes to develop software. QA is backlogged by about six months, and doesn’t have a testing regimen in place anyway, and probably never will because it’s run by the same pack of in-the-dark volunteers who valiantly try to provide end-user support. Kane explicitly dropped the education mission of OLPC, and claimed it was now basically about distributing laptops and to hell with what is done with them. Regardless, OLPC (in keeping with Negroponte’s amazing hubris) will only deal with national governments, and the few programs that are getting the machines into the hands of whatever schools want them (the Give Many program) never took off because (again) nobody at OLPC gives a crap.

Basically, Negroponte started out with a great idea, then made every possible wrong decision and turned it into a steaming pile of failure, and it’s pretty damn depressing.

Paul – you said it best. Moreover, Negroponte still has money to keep going especially after Microsoft bought him out. He has never apologized to all those volunteers for leading them down the garden path while he pressed flesh with important people and preached to the world about what matters and then eventually settled for “money”.

He is a loser of the first order. Long long ago I actually thought he was cool.It is sad to see the shell the man really is.

I see many theories that may explain these facts, but I think these are the two most plausible:

(1) OLPC is near bankruptcy, and is just offloading anything that could plausibly be done by non-staff members for free. This is what I would like to think.

(2) NN decided a long time ago that XO 2 would run Microsoft Windows as the default / recommended by OLPC option, and he has been moving the composition of the organization to not oppose that announcement when it comes. There are some facts that would support this.

a. With the change is management away from Walter Bender a while ago and the recent layoffs, the number of staff members that care enough about user freedom to quit if an announcement such as this were made has moved from the vast majority of employees, including top on-site management, to a much smaller number of people (approaching zero). The successful outsourcing of XO 2 hardware design would allow OLPC to lay off some of the last remaining people who really care about the freedom of users.

b. Looking at http://trac.laptop.org/query (blocker bugs) is scary. The majority of “owners” are people who were among the laid off or otherwise no longer getting money from OLPC – from memory, at least jg, cscott, erikg, dilinger, walter, djbclark, mstone, mbletsas, mchua, and mako.

c. Microsoft has previously surprised the OLPC staff, who initially thought Windows would not run well at all on the XO 1, by going from vague rumors of a port to having a port that worked shockingly well. They did this by throwing lots of engineering time at the problem (I believe more than the entire paid OLPC development staff as it was before the layoffs). There is no way to know that Microsoft doesn’t currently have a large number of people working on a coherent educational suite for the XO 2 to replace Sugar, or to somehow embrace and extend parts of Sugar when running under Windows. And since changes have already been made to the boot firmware to allow it to boot Windows in the XO 1, there isn’t a good reason to believe there will be any hardware-level reasons Windows won’t also work with the XO 2.

d. John Gilmore’s post in reply to “Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations” on the olpc devel mailing list –
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-December/021841.html – and the “OLPC needs to comply with the GPL” bug – http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4265 – point to the difficulty of continuing with the OLPC’s Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) “anti-theft” measures if running under GNU/Linux. Running Windows would solve this “problem” (said with sarcasm).

If you have been developing for the OLPC XO 1, these would be my (personal) suggestions:

(a) If you have been working on Sugar / Activities, continue doing so – that project has been split off from OLPC at http://sugarlabs.org – I’d suggest licensing any new activities you create under GPLv3, to combat current and any future XO tivoization. Sugar is generally useful, and can be used on non-XO devices, such as the education-focused gdium liberty 1000 – http://www.gdium.com – or any other GNU/Linux machines.

(b) If you like hacking on operating system level stuff, take a look at http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Projects/GNewSenseToMIPS – a project to port gNewSense, one of the most freedom-respecting GNU/Linux distributions (based on Debian and/or Ubuntu), to the mipsel architecture, so it can run on the first generally available laptop that will be supportable by free software with no binary blobs (including the wifi, unlike the XO), the lemote yeeloong – http://www.lemote.com/english/yeeloong.html – this work would also help get Sugar running on a completely free, mobile platform (the gdium uses the same processor as the yeeloong, and people are porting sugar to work on the gdium).

I bought the G1G1 offer last year. This year, I had several people ask me about it and I recommended they all skip it. With the changes in the program, we could not be sure that the laptop we gave away would be Linux. It would be cruel to give the kids a Windows PC, so we could not take a chance.

You have fired up the world with hope – we’re not letting you down. We’re going to keep it going.. We’re behind you .. ready to support the nexgen the hope in children’s eyes on every photo in your archive