Over at the Silicon Valley Sleuth they are looking into allegations that the OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] News has a Intel employee aboard. Not only has the OLPC News been critical of the OLPC project itself, but allegations are surfacing that the Intel employee actually works on Intel’s own junior laptop project. In a statement it says:

The OLPC News website in the past months has build up a reputation for sharply criticizing the $100 laptop project headed up by Nicholas Negroponte.

  The website in particular questions the project’s educational merits: will children automatically become more educated if you provide them with notebook computers? The site’s contributing authors tend to answer that question with a resounding “NO”. They then listen to their own echo in the echo chamber, ignoring the project’s educational goals to poke additional holes  in the project’s perceived strategy.

You can shrug your shoulders and simply ignore the blog, but Christopher Blizzard, one of the OLPC’s contributors and an employee for Red Hat, looked a little bit further. It turns out that one of  the site’s authors works on an Intel project that is competing with the OLPC. Oops.

Intel has never liked the the $100 laptop. The notebooks will use AMD chips and Intel is developing a series of competing computer designs for the developing world.

So it doesn’t take too much of a conspiracy theorist to believe that Intel is secretly bankrolling the OLPC-News website.

If this is true, it all goes back to I have mentioned before. The OLPC is going up against some big guns such as Microsoft and Inetl who are noted for not playing well with others.

Silicon Vally Sleuth story is here. 

OLPC news site is here.

Comments welcome.

[tags]olpc, news, site, intel, employee, articles, amd, developing countries, news, allegations, sleuth,  [/tags]