(2009-07-23) Negroponte Olpc Interview

Nicholas Negroponte was interviewed about the OLPC struggles.

"It bothers me when people spoil the market," he says, alleging Intel once convinced Libyan authorities to provide for 15,000 children instead of 1.5 million. "It's like Mac Donald's competing with the (United Nations) World Food Programme."

According to Negroponte, 50 percent of Peruvian children who have XO laptops teach their parents how to read and write. "If that doesn't give you goose bumps, I don't know what will."

China and India have been the "biggest disappointment" to Negroponte, given the potential impact. "They represent 40 percent of the (world's) children, and neither of them is currently active for different but similar reasons." Both, he laments, have big markets and their own beliefs that they "can do it on their own".

The biggest mistake was not having Sugar UI run as an application "on a vanilla Linux laptop", said OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte. "Sugar should have been an application (residing) on a normal operating system," he told Z D Net Asia in an interview. "But what we did...was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management--it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess."

• Ivan Krstic responds - Here's the problem: through a somewhat regrettable set of naming decisions, the name "Sugar" came to represent two entirely different things. It was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux. Nicholas, evidently, still remains blissfully unaware of any of this... In truth, the XO ships a pretty shitty operating system, and this fact has very little to do with Sugar the GUI. It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken closed-source firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix... This is an old/known issue for every LinuxOS Lap Top. Did they not filter their supplier list based on such factors, or is that they were pushing the hardware in ways that other laptops don't? Or were their requirements cutting-edge enough that they didn't have multiple choices of vendors? I suspect the Embedded Hardware folks don't have as much Zero Defect code as mythology suggests. That was certainly my Zigbee experience.... There's close to a million XOs out there; if Sugar was OLPC's biggest mistake, MsWindows on the XO would be selling like hotcakes. Let me remind you, then, that the number of Windows-based XOs that OLPC has sold is exactly zero.