School-to-school (and parent-to-parent) networking

Here's a short report on an OLPC implementation that is _entirely_ designed and implemented by two schools working together--one in KwaZulu Natal and one in San Rafael, California. Is school-to-school the way to revive the sinking OLPC project? Possibly, not, as OLPC has just  ended its support for small (sub-1,000 laptop) donations.

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: 

Sugar will work on any hardware: We've also ported Sugar to all the major netbook configurations, so it now runs on the [ASUS] Eee PC, the [Intel] Classmate, on any of those devices. 

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.