Jaco’s Random Writings

I’ve loosely been following the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program for some time. Heck, I remember when it used to be called the $100 Laptop Program. Now, I loved the idea behind it. The idea was to make a laptop cheap enough so that schools in 3rd World countries could afford them for the kids. Well, they then went and put in features that would adapt this laptop for conditions in poorer countries that regular laptops wouldn’t be able to perform in i.e. lack of stable electricity (or complete lack of for that matter). Neat. Well, needless to say, they got the price down to $225. Now, it is vastly underpowered compared to a $300 netbook from Dell. But you can’t power netbook by pulling a cord or using a footpedal. I would not mind getting my paws on one, honestly.

Now, the OLPC program has had its share of criticism over the years. The one that stood out the most was “Why are we investing in giving poor kids laptop instead of basic needs like food and clean water?” Well, the old saying goes: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a life time.” Many of these kids in these poor countries do not have access to good education. Those that do go to school, go to schools that vastly underfunded and lack resources. These laptops cost about the same as one of my Calculus textbooks. Now, with a laptop like this, you can access free resources online and distribute digital textbooks easily and cheaply. So while this laptop would cost the school about the same as being a new textbook per child, it will give the children far greater resources to learn by than a single textbook. Heck, this laptop comes with an offline version of Wikipedia!

OLPC has been having some financial issues lately. They had a rough year and had to lay off a lot of people. Needless to say, the Buy 1, Get 1 program was not terribly successful in 2008. However, the future is looking up. OLPC is re-organizing and the new guy is running more like a business* than a non-profit (it’s still a non-profit). There is even a snazzy-looking 2nd iteration of the XO Laptop on the horizon. Now, Mr. Negroponte is aiming at people in these poor countries besides kids, so he has struck a deal with Microsoft to put XP on some of the laptops. I have one warning for Mr. Negroponte: While your deal with M$ is non-exclusive, beware! You are essentially dealing with an corporation that spits in the face of FOSS and open-standards. Make sure M$ doesn’t have strings on you that it can pull to lock you in.

The XO Laptop does sport some nice specs. I personally like the idea that the system is ultra low-power to a point that you could power it yourself. This would be particularly useful when the world ends, the impending Apocalypse cutting off electricity, and my need for a portable knowledge-base becomes more and more desirable. Now, the OS on the XO is the Linux kernel with a desktop environment called “Sugar” over it. You can try out Sugar with certain flavors of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. Sugar comes with a software set that is particularly aimed at making the system useful for kids. The UI is such that it makes it relatively simple for a kid to wrap their mind around it quickly. The word processor, Write, is based off of Abiword and seems to allow for some pretty rich documents. How well it supports ODF is still a little spotty though.

Since I first caught whiff of OLPC many years back, I’ve been pretty excited about what Mr. Negroponte has been trying to accomplish. Having grown up and lived in South Africa**, I know that kids there could really benefit from the boost to their education a laptop like this could provide. My only fear is that once these kids get these laptops, someone (quite possibly a family member) may try and take this laptop and sell it. The danger this poses to the child is pretty heavy. But then, just by being a child, they are pretty much in mortal danger***.

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* As soon as you have people who need to get paid for their work, you need to treat it like a business.
** While not the poorest country in Africa, majority of the population still live in poverty.
*** There is some pretty twisted and horrible things that can happen to kids in many African countries (like other poor and sometimes lawless places in the world). Children are often the victims of rape, mutilation, and use as child soldiers.