I am shocked at the non-response to last week's announcement that LATU Uruguay, the government entity testing both Intel's Classmate PC and One Laptop Per Child's XO computer, rated the XO-1 the better option for the children of Uruguay's Florida province, 56.84 points to 53.06 points.

Am I the only one to notice that this was the first (and so far, only) government administered test between the Classmate PC and XO laptop? A beneficial competition between low-cost laptops for the developing world with an objective winner, One Laptop Per Child.

Where are the Linux geeks screaming victory from the top of Monte VI De Este a Oeste? Do they not realize that with Uruguay poised to buy 100,000 XO laptops running a Sugar user interface on a Linux kernel platform, it is the first large-scale loss for the Wintel duopoly?

No longer is low cost computing in education a fantasy, no longer are big technology companies secondary, and everyone wants to sell technology into classrooms. Intel introduced Classmate PC to Brazil, Asustek is selling Eee PC's in the USA, and even thin-client manufactures compare themselves to OLPC.

• Many third world governments are corrupt and populist
• The real DO-ERS are local enthusiasts, NGO's, eccentric billionares and early adopters. Best to use them.
• Selling in thousands, rather than millions, achieves critical mass and better logistics.

From the public statements of Ivan Kristic and Walter Bender it is clear that the OLPC project, which promised so much, is going through acute problems.

Ivan Kristic quit OLPC in March due to an internal restructure. The details are not fully explained in his blog but there is enough there to be worrying:

"Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project."
- http://radian.org/notebook/maintaining-clarity

After more than two years without a break at One Laptop per Child, I have decided to take some time to reflect on how I can best contribute going forward to the goal of giving children around the world opportunities for a quality learning experience. The OLPC Association is making headway getting laptops into the hands of children and it is encouraging to see that other non-profit and for-profit organizations are following suit. My personal interest is in helping build a community of developers, educators, and learners dedicated to advancing the quality of free and open source software for learning and the sharing of pedagogical approaches in this community by adopting the spirit and methodology of the open-source movement.

While my goal is to create a complementary effort to broaden the reach of the software and pedagogy--a free and open framework in support of "learning learning", I hope to continue working with the great team at OLPC as well as the various groups that have formed around the world in support of one-laptop-per-child deployments.

Thank you for all of your support over the past two years and for all the feedback and encouragement you have given me.
- Where is Walter?

People keep asking me:

 Yes, OLPC's commitment to Sugar has changed. It is now larger, not
smaller. Contrary to inferences drawn by Walter's departure, the press
and venerable sources such as OLPC News, we are scaling Sugar up, not
down. Let me explain.

 Sugar is a very good idea, less than perfectly executed. I attribute
our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices. Our
mission has never changed. It has been to bring connected laptops for
learning to children in the poorest and most remote locations of the
world. Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning
model or pure Open Source. I believe the best educational tool is
constructionism and the best software development method is Open
Source. In some cases those are best achieved like the Trojan Horse,
versus direct confrontation or isolating ourselves with perfection.
Remember the expression: perfection is the enemy of good. We need to
reach the most children possible and leverage them as the agents of
change. It makes no sense for us to search for the perfect learning
model.

 For this reason, Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux
platforms and to run under Windows. We have been engaged in
discussions with Microsoft for several months, to explore a dual boot
version of the XO. Some of you have seen what Microsoft developed on
their own for the XO. It works well and now needs Sugar on top of it
(so to speak).

 As a non-profit, humanitarian organization, OLPC has a unique
position, from which it can change the world for children and
learning. Laptop makers rushing into the low-end marketplace is a
perfect example of success of one kind. Another will be what kids do
outside school and with other kids around the world. A third is what
we do.

 We are not a business, but need to be more business-like: meet
schedules, manage expectations and fulfill promises. To do that, we
need to hire more developers, work more together and spend less time
arguing. Because of public attention, anything we say will be quoted
out of context. We can only speak with our actions and those are only
one: a reliable and ubiquitous Sugar. That includes being more
collaborative engineers ourselves and engaging the community better.
Our limitations are not financial, but identifying the required human
resources and resolve to do so.

 What is in front of us is an opportunity for big change. Sugar is at
the core of it. To pretend otherwise would be a joke. That said, Sugar
needs to be disentangled. I keep using the omelet analogy, claiming it
needs to be a fried egg, with distinct yoke and white, rather than
having the UI, collaborative tools, power management and radios merge
into one amorphous blob. Otherwise, it is impossible to debug and will
be limited to the small, albeit growing, world of the XO hardware
platform.

 As we reach out to engage a wider community, some purism has to morph
into pragmatism. To suggest that this forsakes Open Source or
redirects our mission is absurd. Kids will be the agents of change and
our job is to reach the most of them. That is not just selling
laptops, but making Sugar as robust and widely available as possible.

What’s next for OLPC? I would rather OLPC answer for themselves. Nicholas has made it clear, at least to me, that OLPC needs to be strategically agnostic about learning—that it can’t be prescriptive about learning. So that’s his opinion and that’s where he’s taking OLPC, and that’s not what I want to do, so I left.

X: When you say “agnostic about learning,” what I take that to mean is that there’s a feeling that the XO Laptop should run Windows, and not just Linux and Sugar.

WB: I think it’s pretty obvious and was obvious from the very beginning that it’s a lot easier to cater to people’s comfort than to be disruptive. Nicholas had that wonderful quote in BusinessWeek about a month ago—that OLPC is going to stop acting like a terrorist and start emulating Microsoft. If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers. And that’s a marketing strategy, and one that I think has been adopted by many laptop manufacturers. Personally, I think that the customer is not always right, and that a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them. But that is a minority opinion, so I left to do my own thing.

X: Let’s back up. You’ve said many times, and so has Nicholas Negroponte, that OLPC is a learning project, not a laptop project. So can you talk about the basic pedagogical principles that are important to you, and how Sugar embodies those?

WB: When we started to do this, I tried to build the solution based on three very simple principles about what makes us human. Because I knew this had to be something that worked everywhere, with every child. The first of the three things is that everyone is a teacher and a learner. Second, humans by their nature are social beings. Third, humans by their nature are expressive. I decided those would be the pillars of how we design the user experience for the laptop. The other thing is that I was very much influenced by Seymour Papert and his constructionist theories, which can be summarized in my mind very efficiently by two aphorism. One is that you learn through doing, so if you want more learning you want more doing. The second is that love is a better master than duty. You want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. The first is more addressed by the Sugar technology; the second is more addressed by the culture around freedom.

• Sugar development is under resourced despite requests internally to improve this situation
• To port Sugar to Windows is not a trivial undertaking
• Many believe that Sugar / Windows dual boot system will not ship, that MS will not allow it
• Allegations of lack of transparency or consultation from Negroponte in decision making (see Ivan Kristic's This too shall pass ...)
• OLPC software development will fork between a proprietary pathway and an open source (GPL) pathway
  

Nicholas’ recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way” is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success. The organization decided to move anyway, and extended me a written offer to take over as Chief Software Architect. Nicholas rescinded the offer unilaterally several weeks later, for reasons he refused to explain to anyone. So yes, there was no architect, but that’s because Nicholas didn’t want one. If he believes that’s the cause of Sugar’s problems, he has no one but himself to blame
- This too shall pass