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Jon 'maddog' Hall on FOSS in the developing world (NewsForge)

[Posted June 7, 2006 by corbet]

NewsForge interviews Jon 'maddog' Hall. "One way of getting the price of the OLPC down is through high-volume manufacturing. This is why Mr. Negroponte wants to have millions of these laptops committed. I would guess that most of these would be manufactured in Taiwan or China, not in South Africa. Therefore, millions of rand (dollars, dinar, yen) will flow into China, not stay in South Africa. On the other hand, there are lots of computers being upgraded by banks and companies. They will be "throwing out" good system boxes that would run Linux perfectly fine, and which could be donated to a local charity. By gathering these boxes up, pulling their components apart, reconfiguring them, installing Linux on them, and selling them for $100 -- or even $50 -- you could give a person a good job. "
to post comments

yep

Posted Jun 7, 2006 19:42 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Exactly what I've thought too (short of money streams, but we observe quite similar things here in Ukraine with software).

Jon 'maddog' Hall on FOSS in the developing world (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 7, 2006 20:40 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (1 responses)

It is a shame Maddog hasn't really taken the time to understand OLPC very well. If you're curious to hear more (particularly as to why this isn't about spreading Linux, or even really economic self-sufficiency, and why old desktops would be fairly inappropriate) I'd recommend reading Ethan Zuckerman's excellent recent blog post on the subject.

Jon 'maddog' Hall on FOSS in the developing world (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 8, 2006 5:00 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

I think maddog understands the OLPC project fairly well. He is merely
suggesting other projects which can be carried out locally, without
needing to obtain millions in government funding and then spend it
abroad.

The usual refurbishment of functional but slightly-outmoded computers
adds a lot of value, and could be particularly useful in economies like
South Africa's where an industrial infrastructure (ie. a reliable
electricity grid) already exists but a majority of the population lives
close to the 'poverty line'.

Poisoned chalice for the developing world?

Posted Jun 10, 2006 11:10 UTC (Sat) by csawtell (guest, #986) [Link] (1 responses)

I really hope I'm wrong, but I see these machines as a wonderful toy
produced by the 1st. world from their point of view, rather than a 3rd.
world solution to the 3rd. world problem of poor literacy and numeracy.
Where is the course-ware going to come from? The effort required to create
the lessons will be truly huge when compared to the effort needed to make
the hardware and o/s.
I really can't see over-worked and harrassed teachers producing lessons
after their school duties.

For power, let's not forget that the sun shines brightly in most of the
destination countries.

Poisoned chalice for the developing world?

Posted Jun 10, 2006 20:51 UTC (Sat) by brouhaha (guest, #1698) [Link]

Free college-level course materials are already available from MIT. Perhaps other institutions will follow suit and make K-12 course materials available? The Wikibooks project is making free textbooks available; some of them are pre-college.

Certainly the current situation with regard to course materials isn't ideal, but you have to start somewhere.


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