Dean Landolt

Oh, the train wreck that has become of the OLPC project. Here’s a great insider essay that sheds some light on the internal conflicts. Nobody’s coming out of this clusterfuck smelling like roses! Particularly choice…

Stallman similarly called a Windows port of Sugar “not a good thing to do”. Here’s the thing: such a port is only a waste of time if free software is not the means here, but an end…

A Windows-compatible Sugar would bring its rich learning vision to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of children all over the world whose parents already own a Windows computer, be it laptop or desktop. To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s philosophically impure is downright evil.

And I have to agree. Of course, motives of the Free Software advocates are certainly understandable — advocates advocate. But Negroponte…

Now, pay close attention: while I’m unequivocally enthusiastic about Sugar being ported to every OS out there, I’m absolutely opposed to Windows as the single OS that OLPC offers for the XO. The two matters are completely orthogonal, and Nicholas’ attempt to conflate them by calling the open source community “fundamentalists” (and watching the community foam at the mouth instead of picking apart his logic) is just another bit of misdirection. Not that anyone should really feel offended, since he’s made it a habit to call his employees terrorists.

But this isn’t about Free software…

The whole “we’re investing into Sugar, it’ll just run on Windows” gambit is sheer nonsense. 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.

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; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yeah, I’m not sure what that leaves either.

So it was all a lie…

That OLPC was never serious about solving deployment, and that it seems to no longer be interested in even trying, is criminal. Left uncorrected, it will turn the project into a historical information technology fuckup unparalleled in scale.

I really need to get back to work, but this is like staring at the Sun…

This entry was posted Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Libre, Technologism, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.