The OLPC project started with the best intentions of bright people. It got hyped beyond reason, first by some of its leaders (viz. Negroponte), then by gullible politicians and — at another level — by gullible idealists that failed to see what was in front of them.
Throughout its history the OLPC was flawed; flawed relationships with corporations, flawed marketing, flawed software. The intentions may have been great, when Negroponte rejected Steve Jobs offer for Mac OS X, because ‘it was not open source’, but a few years down the road, with the OLPC project laying off half of its staff, with Sugar having become something different entirely and many of the key people behind the original laptop out of the project, with Windows XP being targeted as the de facto OS for the second version of the laptop, due in some years I guess, it seems ironic, it seems stupid, but most importantly it proves that the OLPC XO-2 will be nothing if not just another ‘netbook’ device, with no particular focus on education, the open source and free culture/information movements and so on.
No, let me correct that; it’ll probably be worse, for so many of the netbooks already support and ship with linux, so much is being done to see the numbers increase and Sugar, what was once promised, but never delivered in any usable/useful/interesting form, has now — as a product of Sugar Labs, joined the GNOME Foundation and will continue to be developed by the community.
If anything, the OLPC u-turn and later dissolution of the project is undoubted proof that Negroponte has been either hypocritical or just plain incompetent in his second attempt at providing cheap computing to the third world.
