…and it appears that the One Laptop Per Child initiative has a few to deal with. So says a former security director, who states that the problem starts at the top, with Nicholas Negroponte.
Apparently Negroponte, for all of his blustering about Linux, wanted Windows XP to run on these machines all along. So much for the purity of motive, and the delight of Open Source.
Harsh words about the cost overruns, the marketing program, and the hardware failures round out the criticism of Ivan Krstić.
Former One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) security director Ivan Krstić is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. He opened up a massive can of damning allegations about OLPC earlier this week in a lengthy tirade on his personal blog. The blog post includes a deeply pessimistic appraisal of constructionist learning theories and some harsh words for OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte, but it also offers some valid and insightful observations about the project’s failings and what can be done to remedy them.
Krstić’s blog post is like an angry rant from one who has escaped from a sinking ship and is now shouting from the shoreline in a futile effort to get the ship’s crew to patch holes in the hull and change course. Despite the extremely caustic tone and occasionally contradictory arguments in the blog post, those of us who have been following OLPC from the start and have seen the litany of problems and failures from a safe distance can sympathize with his frustration.
The OLPC project aimed to produce low-cost, education-focused laptops to sell in large quantities to governments in developing countries. The OLPC XO laptop includes some unique and innovative hardware components and a Linux-based, open source software platform that was designed to promote a constructionist approach to education. OLPC has faced a steady stream of serious problems that have left the project on life support.
The price of the laptop has climbed to $188 per unit as a result of hardware changes and insufficient sales volume. In order to help account for slow sales, OLPC made the XO available in North America through the Give 1 Get 1 program (G1G1), which failed catastrophically as a result of egregiously mismanaged deployment. A growing number of users who received units through G1G1 have experienced hardware failures and a number of other problems. OLPC’s attempt to reorganize and make the project “more like Microsoft” was a complete bust too, and compelled Krstić and others to leave the project.
the article in Ars Technica continues with some other criticisms of the project, including the fact that the Sugar interface, which was to be a cornerstone of the ‘look and feel’, was never really seriously considered. It was given lip service, and not much more.
Krstić continues by accusing Negroponte of lying about his intention to port Sugar to Windows. Krstić believes that the Sugar interface should be ported to as many operating systems as possible so that more users can benefit from it, but he fears that Negroponte will move to Windows exclusively and jettison the Sugar user interface.
“Nicholas knows quite well that Sugar won’t magically become better simply by virtue of running on Windows rather than Linux. In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He’s told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its ‘availability’ as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster,” Krstić wrote. “In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me—and not just me—that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there.”
Such are the problems with many worthy efforts. One problem, from what I’ve been able to piece together, seems to fall into the category of “too many cooks spoil the broth”. There were/are just too many “idea people” and not enough “worker bees” who simply did as they were told. Why the original design was allowed to get so twisted is something Mr. Negroponte seems to want to keep to himself, but I’m certain one of the left turns along the way was thinking that using a Microsoft operating system on low end hardware would be a good idea. Children don’t really need to learn about the Blue Screen Of Death as one of their first lessons.
Ivan Krstić did lay out a fairly good set of things to change, to return the project to sanity, and possibly feasibility. Perhaps someone who can do something about it will read and comprehend.
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Quote of the day:
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. - William G. McAdoo
Tags: olpc, negroponte, microsoft, hardware, give one get one, sugar
