Ivan Krstic sticks a fork in the OLPC project
- TAGS:ivan krstic, OLPC, security, XO
- IT TOPICS:Hardware, Mobile, Open Source, Security
I'm a couple of days late on this, so it may be that you have already had your own personal ears pinned back by Ivan Krstić's positively harrowing post on the pit that the One Laptop Per Child project has become. (Link rated M on account of strong Anglo-Saxon words and untrammelled Richard Stallman bashing. Though I know that's the kind of thing some of you like. A lot.) The former director of security architecture on the project... he's not just disillusioned, he's not just angry, he's both and he's brutally honest about where things are going. Highlights:
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- On Nicholas Negroponte's track record: In the early 80s, Nicholas and Seymour [Papert] ran a pilot program backed by the French government that placed Apple ][ machines in a suburban computing center in Dakar, Senegal. The project was a spectacular flop due to mismanagement and personality conflicts...
- On Richard Stallman's furious comparison of using proprietary software for the OLPC XO laptop to drug peddling: Oh, for [strong Anglo-Saxon word]'s sake. You really just employed a simile comparing a proprietary OS to addictive drugs? You know, ones causing actual bodily harm and possibly death? Really, Stallman? Really?
- On the OLPC's supposed virtue of user-modifiable software: I can't possibly be the only one seeing that the emperor has no clothes.
- And, damningly for all of us who believed in the educational goals of the project, on the real purpose of OLPC: In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He's told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its "availability" as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster. In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there...
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And it just keeps going, and going, and god help us all going. It's an incredibly long read, but I'm giving it to you before a three-day weekend -- long enough to read, long enough to digest, and maybe even long enough to throttle down from utter disgust.
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