I have always been sceptical of OLPCs grand strategy for two reasons:
1 - They don't seem to be relying on being so good that they grow like mad. They seem to want to make deals with ministers of education. If the laptop is such an affordable & brilliant educational tool, then its reasonable to assume parents/kids everywhere would want one. How unique are children in Africa, really.
2 - All we get is 12 months. They don't control the underlying costs of making a computer with good intentions. They rely on existing market forces. By encouraging a certain market, all they can do is get us there a little faster. If they didn't exist, it's likely that a commercial vendor would supply this market.
That said, the on-a-stick, on-an-old-pc model sounds like a good idea. Not just for kids, also for the very large number of people who cannot afford their own PC but can afford internet cafe, shared-at-school or shared-at-home.
If you could have your own pc on a stick with all your documents, files, software etc., it is a significant improvement on just access to the pc without this. It may even lower the cost of internet cafe type access. The by-product is that it significantly reduces the barrier to using a different operating system.
Seriously, they dawdled around so long it became irrelevant before they actually launched.
If they had sold them to anyone who wanted one they would have been making money to further their development as well as exposing the hardware to thousands of potential developers.
Then Microsoft got in on them and netbooks appeared and that was all she wrote.
This is not a MS bash, but a hardware resources and price point issue.
If they made money by selling them to anyone who wanted one, that would imply that people who could afford one might want one. It would imply that these are viable to produce for a market.
In that case, what do we really need a non profit for? Get this hardware to developing country children? Put together a software package? Lobby the governments to allocate funds to the OLPC mission?
Personally I think non-profits are a stupid idea, having seen a number of them hijacked by people of less than stellar intentions.
If you want to service a need then start a business. If you want to serve a low margin market, then figure out a low cost business model and run with it.
There is something romantic about the whole non-profit thing that just seems narcoticly attractive to idealistic people who think of business as evil.
Business is not evil inherently, just some implementations of it and it has somehow soiled the whole thing for a generation who are mooning around for something of meaning to fill their workdays.
The scope of meaning has unfortunately been reduced to working at a nonprofit.
You can also boot from CD-ROM. That very page says:
If you have an older machine or you just want things to immediately work without fussing with the BIOS, you can burn a "Boot Helper" CD using the .iso below. This will start the boot from the CD, then read files from the USB stick: http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/soas-boot.iso
I'd rather see my young son figure out a typical GUI desktop than a whole new concept which I feel is a dead-end, even if it's arguably better.
If they had made it such that within 5 minutes I could have made contact with some other kid with Sugar over the Internet, I might have been convinced to go that way. I appreciate that may not have been the designers' focus.
1 - They don't seem to be relying on being so good that they grow like mad. They seem to want to make deals with ministers of education. If the laptop is such an affordable & brilliant educational tool, then its reasonable to assume parents/kids everywhere would want one. How unique are children in Africa, really.
2 - All we get is 12 months. They don't control the underlying costs of making a computer with good intentions. They rely on existing market forces. By encouraging a certain market, all they can do is get us there a little faster. If they didn't exist, it's likely that a commercial vendor would supply this market.
That said, the on-a-stick, on-an-old-pc model sounds like a good idea. Not just for kids, also for the very large number of people who cannot afford their own PC but can afford internet cafe, shared-at-school or shared-at-home.
If you could have your own pc on a stick with all your documents, files, software etc., it is a significant improvement on just access to the pc without this. It may even lower the cost of internet cafe type access. The by-product is that it significantly reduces the barrier to using a different operating system.