OLPC and Sugar divide the community property
OLPC news carries part of an interview with Walter Bender, who discusses pulling the Sugar OS out of Nick Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child Project's XO laptop:
Just below that interview, Negroponte is quoted as to the benefits of dumping Sugar for Fedora and/or Windows XP. Wayan Vota says that with this shift, the revised OLPC mission is to become "the Dell of the developing world."
Negroponte can't be that stupid. Prices on more powerful machines, like the Asus eee pc, are dropping fast, a bunch of bigger hardware players, prompted by Intel, AMD and Via are moving into the low-power "niche". (I love the irony of describing a 2-billion-person market as a niche.) Can he possibly want to be bought?
Although Mr Bender has no money and an all-volunteer operation, his half of the divorce proceedings--a portable software platform specifically designed to support learning--has the advantage in that it's unique. Sugar on a stick has an opportunity to rise or fail based on its own virtues.
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