User:Bernie

Volunteer at OLPC. Hacking on X, base OS, kernel and i18n.

e-mail: bernie AT laptop DOT org

Personal homepage: http://www.codewiz.org/

My OLPC projects: http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/OneLaptopPerChild

Why we should be more open

Openness will be our greatest and most lasting strength.  If we shy away
from it now it will never return.
 -- Samuel Klein

"We should be more open" may strike many as a surprising suggestion for OLPC, since it's already supposed to be one of the most open projects out there.

But opening just the source without opening the rest of the development process is a recurring pitfall in which even large corporates such as RedHat and Sun all fell, initially. I see us likely to fall into the same circular thinking that "trying to involve external contributors does not pay off because so far we've got so little external contributions".

And I've heard the argument that "working on our platform would be too hard for outside contributors". This can't possibly be true: projects like OpenWRT and the Linux kernel and dozens of RTOS projects out there regularly attract flocks of hackers who are very capable of working on all kinds of fancy and undocumented hardware and exotic OSes, with great results.

My access point can now play MP3s :-)