This 13 May 2008 long essay by Ivan Krstić should be mandatory reading for people who care about OLPC. It is a reflection, bitter in places, by an ex-OLPC insider, on the massive changes in direction the OLPC project is now taking (with a re-orientation towards Windows), and on the roles of Open Source and proprietary software and the relationship between the two. It ends:
"I’m trying to convince Walter [Bender] not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation. For those who still care about learning ...... the charge should be to start that organization, since OLPC doesn’t want to be it. Having a company that is device-agnostic and focuses entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar, is not only what I think is sorely needed to really take the one-to-one computer efforts to the next level, but also an approach that has a good chance of making the organization doing the work self-sustaining at some point."
"So here’s to open learning, to free software, to strength of personal conviction, and to having enough damn humility to remember that the goal is bringing learning to a billion children across the globe. The billion waiting for us to put our idiotic trifles aside, end our endless yapping, and get to it already."
Comments