The government of Colombia has established a deal to bring the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project's distinctive XO laptop to the country for a pilot program that will involve schools in several towns. These laptops won't be packing the penguin, however, because they will come with Microsoft's Windows XP operating system preinstalled.
OLPC is a nonprofit organization that originally emerged from MIT's Media Lab, and it produces low-cost Linux-based education laptops that are sold in bulk to the governments of developing countries. The project has suffered some serious setbacks and has largely been eclipsed by Intel's competing Classmate PC initiative.
As part of an effort to recover and change direction, OLPC decided earlier this year to collaborate with Microsoft so that the company could make Windows available on the XO as an option for governments. This was a highly controversial decision and it alienated some of the project's key contributors and most ardent supporters within the Linux community.
Colombia has now become the second country to launch a pilot program for Windows-based XO systems. (The first was Peru, which announced its own plans back in September.) The government of Colombia has decided to deploy the little laptops in the towns of Quetame and Chia. Quetame has seen particularly rough times this past year and suffered serious damage when it was ravaged by the El Calvario earthquake in May.
No big deal?
The exact nature of OLPC's plans for Windows is a subject of heated debate. OLPC chief Nicholas Negroponte says that the goal is to eventually bring dual-boot support to the laptops so that they can be shipped with both operating systems. He also says that OLPC plans to develop a Windows port of the organization's Linux-based Sugar user interface environment. This claim is disputed by OLPC's former security director who has said that Negroponte is lying and that OLPC plans to eventually ship plain Windows-based XOs without Sugar.
A new voice to weigh in on the issue is Greg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat's community relations manager. He has been closely involved with the development of OLPC's Linux platform, which is built on top of Red Hat's Linux distribution. According to DeKoenigsberg, the significance of the Colombia pilot program has been overstated and OLPC is not directly involved with it.
"Microsoft committed to purchase 10,000 [XO] machines in May, customized to run Windows. They're free to do whatever they want with those machines. For instance: if Microsoft wants to run a pilot of unspecified size in two towns, and turn that pilot into a huge PR event... they are perfectly free to do that," he wrote in a blog entry.
"The reason these 10,000 systems had to be customized? Simple: Windows can't even boot on open firmware. Can't even boot! Which means that the other 990,000 XO (or so) systems in the wild CANNOT EVEN RUN WINDOWS with the firmware installed on them. OLPC builds XOs with Linux. OLPC will continue to build XOs with Linux. OLPC has no plans to change this. None."
DeKoenigsberg hopes to dispel the perception that OLPC has been commandeered by Microsoft or has shifted away from its open source roots to accommodate the software giant. Although OLPC has officially affirmed this on numerous occasions, we have also seen some contradictory evidence from Negroponte.
Negroponte has played up OLPC's collaboration with Microsoft in the past, saying that the XO's SD slot was added specifically to accommodate Windows. He also drew fire from critics earlier this year when he claimed that one goal of OLPC's major reorganization effort was to make the operation run "more like Microsoft," a statement that many participants viewed as being antithetical to OLPC's original values.
Despite all of the problems and controversy, OLPC does appear to be learning from some of its past mistakes. The Give 1 Get 1 program this year looks like it could be a lot more successful than the previous attempt. The original G1G1 program was launched last year to make XO laptops available for purchase in North America through a donation program that helped make free XO units available to students in developing countries. Although the concept was very good, the program failed miserably due to delays, shortages, and serious shipping problems.
OLPC has learned its lesson and has partnered with Amazon to sell the laptops this year. The latest news is that G1G1 will also be available in Europe and not just North America, a change that will open the program to many more prospective buyers.
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