News about LANCOR v. OLPC (Groklaw)

The "charity" is not giving laptops away, it is selling them to governments and users as a way
of making money. Also lets be clear about this, charity is no excuse for breaking the law. If
a cancer charity sold an application infringing on GPL copyrights - without first asking
permission - in order to make money for their cause, would that be perfectly okay. And in any
event $20m isn't very much anyway. 

As regards OLPCs charitable aims, well consider these two facts:
1) Their CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, has set up a company to commercialise and profit from the
technology developed for this charitable product (and indirectly subsidised by US tax-payers
through tax exemptions)
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1290/olpc-cto-jepsen-quits-07...

2) At a meeting this month in Cambridge, Mass., with representatives of Macedonia's
government, Mr. Negroponte balked at authorizing a pilot project there after learning that
officials also were considering testing the Classmate. He told them he didn't want to
participate in a "bake-off."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119586754115002717.html

Which means it seems to have turned into some sort of anti-Windows / anti-Intel competition
instead of a charity


The OLPC has taken a rather sinister turn. I can't help but suspect that it's as much about
getting interest and funding for MIT Media Lab experiments as it is about "helping the
children". The development of the Sugar interface is one case in point: given that they refuse
to sell it to adults the skills children learn from Sugar will be of little use when they use
a "real" computer. Indeed, the fact that they won't sell it to adults is odd given their claim
that computers are necessary to lift people out of poverty, and smacks of a certain colonial
paternalism. Why not do what Asus did with the EEE, a quick-launch desktop, and a normal KDE
desktop accessible behind it? Why foist an untested, experimental, academic UI on the poor?
Why not give them what the rich world uses, and what they will have to use when they grow up?

Then there's the raw incompetence of it, such as the fact that they supplied laptops with
latin keys to countries using the cyrillic alphabet
(http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140698-c,notebooks/arti...), their unwillingness to
deal with legitimate worries by purchasing governments (point (2) above), their inability to
ship orders (http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/g1g1/olpc_g1g1_telepho...), the
shrill anti-Intel, anti-Windows approach they've taken in spite of ostensible apolitical,
altrusitic aims, and the opaque UI they've developed without external input (see what these
two had to do with it to find their wireless network
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4a6qHcxF0c)

That they infringed copyright, given how poorly they've executed this (and how poorly MIT
Media Lab has executed research in the past - they were kicked out of Ireland and India), is
hardly surprising. Nor is it defensible. Groklaw is wrong here, LANCOR have a case, and $20m
is not a large amount of money given that millions already invested in OLPC.

Astroturfing? Godwin's Law? Good lord, kids, get off your high horses.

I agree that technology is a good way to develop the economies of poor countries (which often
missed out on the industrial revolution). I'm personally impressed by the inroads made by
mobile phones (particularly in Africa) which have made it easier for people to trade with each
other (by finding a market with a demand for their products) and communicate with each other
(and thus deflect government propaganda). Indeed, in the short term, phones may be the most
useful "computers" in poor countries. For US phone users, I should point out phones aren't
locked in, and don't have billing. Most have pay-as-you-go schemes where you buy a card with a
credit number, enter the number in your phone, and get, e.g. $10 worth of calling credit.
These cards alone have helped the economy with most towns having groups of children selling
them. The phones themselves also tend to be quite cheap: Nokia for example makes money selling
extra-cheap phones to these countries, and some locals have hire or hire-purchase schemes
operating, so it is within reach of the poor.

Also it is important to realise most people in poor countries (including all of Africa) can
read, write and do arithmetic (something a lot of people on message boards don't seem to
realise). Most poor countries have decent, if unspectacular education systems. Therefore they
do not need laptops to teach them how to read. The laptops are useful to access the Internet,
and while the Mesh network is quite intriguing, I'm not sure how it connects to the overall
Internet: a modem hooked up to a mobile phone would be better. Given the prevalence of mobile
phones, access to each other is less important than access to the broader Internet (which
again can help defend against propaganda).

Overall I like the hardware on the OLPC. It has dealt well with the issue of unreliable
infrastructure in poor countries in novel and interesting ways.

My problems are as follows:
(1) If laptops are necessary to boot-strap economies, why aren't they being sold to everyone.
Why sell only to children? Do they want children to leave school and try to work before
growing up? 

(2) If they want them to learn computer skills that they can use when working as adults, why
train them on an interface that is completely different to every other interface out there,
given that as adults they won't be allowed use OLPC laptops, they'll most likely be using
standard Windows or Linux desktops. Why not train them for the computers they're going to use

(3) Why create an experimental UI for the OLPC. Why not something like the Asus UI. It looks
to me like they're making guinea pigs of the poor. Did you see the video? To find a network
you click on a very small icon in the border, which shows a screen full of stars, representing
networks. You have to click on the correct star (they're not labeled, you have to hover to
find out) and then up pops a normal dialog where you enter your details. That may seem
immediately intuitive to you, but I think gnome-network-manager / knetworkmanager are both
far, far easier.

(4) Why refuse to sell laptops to a government when it said it wanted to also consider
alternatives, like Classmate. Why try to force an OLPC monopoly. I know they need economies of
scale for it to work, but as any Linux user should appreciate, open competition is also good. 

(5) Why should people like Mary Lou be allowed profit from work done by declared charities
subsidised by tax-breaks and donations?

If the OLPC used the Asus EEE interface, and accepted competition, I'd be overjoyed. But their
aversion to competition, use of untested interfaces on the poor, shoddy business-sense, and
use of charity as a get-out clause unsettles and annoys me. The poor shouldn't be treated
differently to everyone else, they should be given the exact same choices and capabilities.
Companies have discovered cheap computing (thanks to Asus, which in turn owes a debt to OLPC).


I hope in the near future, children _and_ adults in poor countries will have access to cheap
computers, and the Internet, and be able to build up their own local business and grow them
from there like Infosys managed in India. OLPC and its backers, while broadly well-intentioned
(I've never been impressed with the MediaLab) seem to be continuing a bad Western habit of
patronising paternalism: computers for people's children taken away from them when they grow
up, interfaces that leave them at a loss when they try standard computers at home or abroad,
and no hope of learning the kind of IT skills that would allow them create products and earn a
living for themselves (it's impossible to write, debug and test a program on the Sugar UI).

Firstly, I freely admit, this has nothing to do with LANCOR. I'm just irritated by the OLPC
hype which seems to have swept away criticism about the engineering and managerial competence
behind the product. I've twice been labeled an "astroturfer" and (not) labeled a "moron"
because I criticised it, which I find quite offensive.

I don't accept your point about the necessity of the Sugar UI: I used a Mac Classic from
1992-1995 with a nine-inch black-and-white screen, and it had a full UI. I did desktop
publishing in Quark Express, word processing and spreadsheet with ClarisWorks, database stuff
with Hypercard and even a little C programming with the very odd C programming environment it
had. There is simply no need for the custom UI, and absolutely no reason for it to be so
strange and esoteric. It looks to be a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. Further, it
has created problems of its own, as a lack of testing means it is quite unreliable (unlike,
say XFCE, or a stripped down KDE or Gnome): see this review for more
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_i...

OLPC has confirmed they won't sell laptops to adults (it's all in the name), which I feel is
short-sighted. However if they don't sell a laptop to adults, children will have to transition
to Mac, Windows or Gnome/KDE desktops when they grow up, which they simply will not have been
trained to do by the OLPC. People can already read and write, the OLPC should be about letting
them communicate, create and profit. This means standard GUIs, with basic programming and
spreadsheet tools, not kiddie drawing kits.

Mary Lou Jepsen has expressly said she plans to use the technology she developed at OLPC;
quoting from the linked article "Jepsen noted in an e-mail that she was starting a for-profit
company to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC". This is not a
talented person moving onto do something new, it's a talented person looking to make money off
something old that she developed at a registered not-for-profit.

The fact that Negroponte has even once (that I know of) tried to force a country to accept his
product speaks volumes about his own sense self-importance, and his own lack of confidence in
the product itself (why fear competition?).

The last mistake you made is about the price. If you converted the $100 to commodities, or
stable currencies such as the euro or pound sterling at the time the laptop was announced,
you'll see that measured in those terms today, the price hasn't increased significantly.
Indeed, most poor countries have seen income surge as the prices of commodities from oil to
copper has leaped on the back of increased demand from China and India alongside global
instability. Outside the US, it's not significantly less affordable than in the past.

The ironic thing is that the OLPC has won. It has shown to the world that new price-points can
be found for computers using existing technologies in different ways. The Classmate PC, and
more importantly the Asus EEE wouldn't have existed if the OLPC hadn't come along and upset
the apple-cart. The problem is that the OLPC, while tantalisingly close, is fatally flawed. If
they used the Asus UI on the existing hardware I'd be overjoyed. More likely, in the next 12
months, Asus will find a way of making their existing laptop that bit more cheaper and sell it
with charging kits in developing nations. Then we'll see some change.