The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)recently joined hands with MICROSOFT in the production of the $100 laptop for poor and needy children. This move, made by the founder Nicholas Negroponte now further increases the price of the $100 laptop which is currently sold at a price of $188 by $18-$20. This additional cost is actually 3$ for the WINDOWS and the rest for Hardware adjustments.
Mr.Nicholas, who was expecting to have sold millions of the “XO” laptops by this time, has infact only received close to 600,000 orders till now. The deal for WINDOWS was made to pacify the hesitation of various Educational ministers regarding the usage of the new “SUGAR” interface made by the OLPC team for XO.
This deal with MICROSOFT hasn’t gone that well with the resident OLPC developers of SUGAR, a software built on LINUX software. The SUGAR developers believe that with MICROSOFT WINDOWS in the picture, the importance, the essence of SUGAR gets completely diminished and that this move is directed more towards corporate ambitions rather than education as a priority. The entire deal about SUGAR was that it was based on LINUX and thus made it very cost effective. This thought was towards controlling the cost of the $100 laptop which is to be targeted towards places such as Haiti, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Mongolia and Birmingham and Ala.
“OLPC changed its mission outright, and in the most ill-conceived way imaginable,” is what Ivan Krstic, a former security developer for the laptop group, recently wrote in an e-mail.