It was a beautiful idea, almost to good to be true, or was that just what it was? A 100 dollar laptop with only free, open source software. It was to run Linux, a special scaled down version of Redhat. The foundation and Nicholas Negroponte for that reason turned down Steve Jobs’offer of getting Apple OSX free of charge!

Finally also children in the third world would get the chance to use a computer and the Internet, was my thought, just as so many others must have believed. But soon the computer was costing far more, and then no one seemed want the computers. Well, not entirely true, but they had to be bought in such a large number that only a few countries did.

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This week Microsoft announced an agreement with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that will make Windows XP available on the non-profit’s low-cost laptops for third-world children. The foundation have agreed to pay 3 dollars per license. Funny, cause they could have used MacOS X for free. The blue screen of death in many ways symbols the death of the OLPC project. I guess the Sugar interface project will live on, but why would developers continue with the OLPC project? Sugar can already run onFedora, Debian and Ubuntu, and was developed to be a platform for educational software and that could very well even run on Windows.

And many have jokefully said: “Thank goodness third world children will no longer have to struggle to learn Linux…“. Well, this time it was all about bad management. As Ivan Krstic said it on his blog:

Nicholas’new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work. But hey, I guess they’ll sell more laptops that way.

As so often, a dream is not enough.