Controversies

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A Wiki is not a good place to conduct an argument, but it can help greatly to reduce thrashing in arguments conducted elsewhere, by tracking who actually said what, and then by recording what the controversy is held to be by various participants. Anybody who feels misrepresented here should provide a link to the original statement, and a brief explanation.

The key to resolving arguments is to find where people are talking past each other, and challenge each side to reply to the actual question with actual evidence. See, for example, the thread on Multilingual URIs at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/1997Apr/0003.html, right after I joined the discussion, up through http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/1997Apr/0131.html. One side said that ASCII-encoded Unicode URLs were an absolute necessity, right away, and the other side insisted that this would break the Web. I insisted that we could not settle this by ranting about our opinions, but that we needed working code and sysadmin procedures. At the end, we had to answer the question, how one would type a multilingual URL in Japanese, in considerable detail. After we got all of that cleared up, everybody agreed that the proposed solution was workable, but did not belong in the standard under discussion. What to do next was easy to decide.

Code is not the answer to the question of Sugar on Windows. But let us see what might be.

Several of the controversies are too big for this page, so short summaries appears here, with links to more detailed pages.

If you feel strongly about any of these issues, you are welcome to add your signature (, ~~~~) and brief comments here, or to create another page for a topic that doesn't have one, and say as much as you like on the new page.

The Mission

Nicholas has removed Constructionism from the mission statement.

  • Pro: NN
  • Con: Put it back. Computerizing our current broken education system is not the solution.--Edward Mokurai Cherlin 22:24, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

Porting Sugar to Windows

  • Nicholas Negroponte has had a stroke of genius. (This link goes to a cleaned-up version of the HTML e-mail that NN sent to a text-only mailing list.) If we get Sugar ported to Windows, then Sugar will become a Trojan Horse that Microsoft will promote to developing nations, and much of our work is done for us. This will be by far the fastest method of getting Sugar to as many children as possible. And once we've done it, everybody will convert to Sugar on Linux, because it is so obviously superior, thus destroying Microsoft, as the Greeks did to Troy in the Trojan Horse analogy. So let's go that route. It is not yet clear whether this is intended to mean OLPC putting time and money into the port, or just leaving it to Microsoft to do. Several of us have put that question to NN, but he has not answered it.
  • Or, alternatively, NN has had a stroke of madness. If we get Sugar ported to Windows, then Windows will take over the world, locking the poor in forever, and it will be our fault. But Scott Ananian claims that Sugar can't be ported effectively to Windows, with the implication that it will take a year or more to get even a feeble version running. And in any case, one can run Sugar-on-Linux on Windows in emulation or in CoLinux right now, because Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) includes Sugar packages. Or put a Sugar/Linux Live CD in a Windows PC, or even an x86 Mac, and not bother porting. Whether that works on the XO remains to be seen, because nobody outside Microsoft has access to MS WinXP prototypes for the XO.
  • Or not. Sugar on Windows could be an irrelevance, because we aren't going to outsmart Microsoft, and Linux is growing steadily without such shenanigans. Don't forget, the 800 lb. gorilla doesn't have to outsmart you.

NN argues for a Linux/Windows dual-boot configuration of the XO, which he has discussed with Microsoft. Microsoft is against it.

NN: "We have been engaged in discussions with Microsoft for several months, to explore a dual boot version of the XO."

Microsoft denies dual-boot Linux/Windows XO laptops are on its agenda: "While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop."

So, then, what is the proposal? We don't know. NN has not yet said whether he wants to put OLPC money and people onto the porting project. He has talked about a Windows-only version of the laptop, but apparently does not mean to abandon Linux development.

  • OLPC should put money and people into porting Sugar to Windows:
  • OLPC should let Microsoft do any Windows porting: --Mokurai 22:31, 30 April 2008 (EDT)
  • Port Free Software? What are you smoking?!: Microsoft, apparently

No proprietary software. Really.

Free Mac OS X spurned by $100 laptop creators, By Jo Best, Silicon.com, Published: 15 November 2005 12:25 GMT. "Software behemoth Microsoft has also yet to determine its involvement in the $100 laptop scheme, although at present the use of open source software will preclude it from contributing a Windows operating system."

The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality, By STEVE STECKLOW, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, November 14, 2005. "Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company's operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders. 'We declined because it's not open source,' says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment."

  • Pro: --Mokurai 22:32, 30 April 2008 (EDT)
  • Con: NN?

Losing key people

The claim is made that Nicholas Negroponte's policies are driving out key people. Here are some of them.


  • Pro: Are any of these the software "Fundamentalists" that NN was talking about?
  • Con: --Mokurai 22:34, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

Lack of communication

Nicholas Negroponte does not talk to the volunteers. Well, he started to, just recently. We'll have to see where the conversation goes.

  • Pro: NN, until recently
  • Con:--Mokurai 22:41, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

There is no place to find OLPC press releases.

  • Pro:
  • Con:--Mokurai 22:41, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

Nicholas Negroponte shoots off his mouth to the press, making announcements of non-existent deals with Microsoft, describing OLPC as acting like terrorists, complaining about Open-Source Fundamentalists, and wanting OLPC to be like Microsoft. Among other things.

  • Pro: NN, apparently.
  • Con: --Mokurai 22:41, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

XOs for the developed world

Kim Quirk and Robert Fadel have made it clear in e-mails and conversations with Edward Mokurai Cherlin of Earth Treasury that policy as they understand it is to maximize XO shipments to developing nations at the lowest possible cost. Shipments to developed countries, such as the US, don't count toward the mission. OLPC management doesn't have time to work with OLPC Chicago on Illinois HB5000, The Children's Low-Cost Laptop Act. We got the brushoff from Darah Tappitake <countries@laptop.org>.

Kim Quirk: "OLPC's focus is on development, funding and delivery of laptops to the least developed countries. The expectations for features, testing, support, logistics, delivery, IT and RF infrastructure (to name a few things) are widely different between schools in Rwanda and those in NYC (for example). We just don't have the man-power today to meet these expectations world-wide." http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012958.html

Just as if there weren't any poor people in Chicago or New York.

Talking about features, testing, support, logistics, delivery, IT and RF infrastructure as the problem makes no sense. We can offer the same product on the same terms in the US as anywhere else to any government that wants it, and others can supply the rest of what is needed.--Mokurai 01:28, 29 April 2008 (EDT)

  • Pro: NN, Kim Quirk, Robert Fadel
  • Con:--Mokurai 22:44, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

Minimum price at the expense of everything else

Robert Fadel has made it clear to Edward Mokurai Cherlin of Earth Treasury that policy is to keep costs for the XO to the absolute minimum possible, regardless of the effects of that policy on the program. This makes Give Many impossible to deal with. The chain of causes is, lowest price-->cash in advance, OLPC has no say in production schedules-->no way to quote a delivery time.

  • Pro: NN, Robert Fadel
  • Con:--Mokurai 22:45, 30 April 2008 (EDT)

GiveOneGetOne disasters

G1G1 was launched with insufficient forethought and managerial oversight. Publicly documented problems:

  • Brightstar created an incompetent order entry system, which threw away the second line of any address, and overwrote corrections with the earlier, incorrect data multiple times. They do say that doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.
  • It took over a month to figure out how to ship to Canada.
  • There was a wholly inadequate support system in place, with not enough volunteers and no automatic replies to e-mails at first.
  • Orders placed in November, 2007 were not all fulfilled until late March, 2008.
  • In the face of overwhelming demand, the program was shut down on December 31, 2007, and the public was told that there would not be another for the US and Canada.
  • There is supposed to be a G1G1 for Europe some day. Don't hold your breath.

Give Many is a cruel joke

Give Many has changed its story on terms without warning, so that Earth Treasury feels that Brightstar and OLPC management cannot be trusted. The most recent terms are

  • Cash in advance
  • Delivery date to be set within 60 days
  • Delevery date may be as far away as nine or ten months

Schools that are required by law to buy on purchase order obviously cannot participate. Few NGOs can tie up their funds in interest-free loans to manufacturers.

Dissing Open Source

NN complained about Open Source fundamentalists interfering with the success of the project. The community objects to this characterization, vehemently. The Flash vs. Gnash issue is part of this. NN claimed that Flash wouldn't run on the XO, which turns out not to be the case.

Many consider Richard Stallman (rms) of GNU to be the ultimate Open Source fundamentalist, but he has talked about getting an XO[1] [2]to replace his aging Thinkpad. Theo de Raadt, founder of OpenBSD, is apparently the real one. He objects to the entire project because of three segments of code on chips, two of them in ROM.

Educational agnosticism

Nicholas Negroponte says that he wants OLPC to pull back from its support for the educational philosophy and methods of Constructionism, that is, learning by doing in a process of collaborative discovery.

Minimum Standard for Success

After all this controversy, you might be feeling a little bit down. There is cause for hope. Joshua Pritikin conjectures that two points in this debate matter more than the others:

  • OLPC must not ship a laptop loaded only with Windows. Dual-boot is tolerable. Ideally, OLPC should not force buyers to purchase Windows. We have had enough of the Microsoft tax. If OLPC starts selling Windows-only laptops then it is time to search for or create a new hardware vendor.
  • As Richard Stallman said, we need more and better free software for education. On one hand, this is true whether OLPC (the hardware company) founders or flourishes. On the other hand, the better the educational software that is available, the easier it will be for OLPC to flourish via shipping Sugar + GNU/Linux.

OLPC and XOs are deployed (by Governments) without following the original principles

This means big risk of failure for the educational project. IF in the next 3 years there is no Sugar, and there is no OLPC, the whole educative project can survive... wounded... but it will survive. The ideas (principles) are set up and they can be developed with other tools (Windows?) or by other organization (many). IF the original educative principles are not followed then there is no possible solution: with or without XOs, with or without OLPC, the educative project will be deeply sick and it will be a failure or just a "political" thing that will not have real impact in the global population of poor children.

These are the big risks than can be seen in today's scenery:

a) Too focused training (exclusive?) in Sugar/Linux. Teachers and children will not be prepared to deal with the more than possible XO/Windows computers.

b) Theres is risk that the "self repairing" idea for the XOs can be lost. Repairing and giving service and training to 250,000 computers (in Peru) is a BIG business that will be search by many top companies that will put its own thoughts and realities over children and teachers. Furthermore, IF the computer belongs to the children and NOT to the school... then what money has this children to send HIS/HER computer for repairing?

c) The promises for self generated energy are not available yet. This is a big risk of failure because the government (in a logical and understandable movement) will send the XOs to villages that have electricity. This will leave thousands of children in small villages without any possibility to reach one XO.

d) We, all, are preaching to the chorus. We are not reaching the poorest children: we are letting government to send the XOs to cities and villages were there are full electricity, VSATS, and other kinds of previous development. We are doing "what can be done". That is not good enough.

e) In Peru there was an old project named "Huascaran" (Internet and computers for the rural areas). It involves huge resources from the government. It doesn't make logic that the XOs and OLPC becomes part of the old "Huascaran" project. That will put oil in and old structure, that will help for the survival and renewal of "Huascaran" project (named differently in these days). But this is, again, preaching to the chorus. The villages that have a VSAT or that can be "inside" the government budget to get a VSAT are not the villages that are in deep need of OLPC help. We keep preaching to the chorus: those children look poor, they are poor. But that is for "U.S." standards. For local standards we have deeper and more humiliating poverty that need us more.

f) There are some voices that point that the XOs will not be property of the children. We should explain the necessity of this to the responsible people. Any other explanation is just "hot air", most of the time we will hear voices related to the power and selfish related to the right to "administer" a pool of 50 or 70 computers (XOs) in this or other town... or 200 or 300 XOs in this or that area (I will not surprise to find that some "clever" people get extra money in their monthly salary according to how many computers (XOs) get under his/her "administration").

g) The lack of content: all what I have seen is not of real and good value. The fact that the information that will be put at the reach of the children is the SAME that was available for the old "Huascaran" project lead us to think that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark". The fact that in that group of literature there are more than 30 manuscripts by an obscure author tell us that this is not all the info that we need to provide to the isolated children.

h) There is no guarantee that the XOs will be a wold wide communication tool. If the XOs are useful JUST for communication between 50 kids then we will get the best that 50 poor isolated children can develop with their knowledge and experience. The lack of collaboration between schools is just the tip of the iceberg, it was recently reported as due to "economic reasons" in the networking structure by the Peruvian Ministry of Education (my country! my authorities! my responsibility too...). If the XOs are not connected and collaboration is not develop at its full reach then we are letting behind all the knowledge and previous experience that the whole human race has develop by centuries. Words too big? No way.

Finally... Education doesn't guarantee nothing. Worse case (or better case?) sometimes education means revolution (sometimes pacific... sometimes... not so pacific... like the French revolution...)... but in one way or another we need to give education. If not we will be like that French King that didn't want to publish the 28 volumes of Diderot's "Encyclopedia" (published from 1751 to 1771.. ten years before the French Revolution (1789))... That king (Luis XVI) said: "Those two men (Voltaire and Rousseau)have destroyed France" (meaning him). And Voltaire said: “books rule the world, or at least those nations which have a written language..." (http://www.pressjohn.com/schoolStuff/historynotes/French%20revo4class.html). The king said ... "who will cultivate our fields if the peasants get educated?" and he will not without reason: in the next years many farmers come to the city... and a revolution was born (Just for the record: I prefer evolution over revolution).

If we don't have Linux/Sugar we are wounded. But we will survive. All these other factors are the ones that have the real potential to kill the educative project and transform it in a political/economical movement without real big importance in the education of poor children.

We live in "an unweeded garden" (Hamlet).

Javier Rodriguez Peru May 01 12:17 AM Lima, Peru


References

Mailing list threads

Blog posts

Interviews with Nicholas Negroponte

  • OLPC should be 'more like Microsoft', Troubled '$100 laptop' maker seeks new CEO, By Agam Shah, IDG News Service, March 07, 2008
  • OLPC’s Negroponte Responds to Intel’s Classmate 2 and New Low-Cost Laptops, April 8th, 2008 by Joanna Stern, Laptop Magazine. NN: "There is nothing to report on OLPC America, yet."
  • Low-cost laptop program sees a key leadership defection, By BRIAN BERGSTEIN - AP Technology Writer, Posted on Tue, Apr. 22, 2008. "Negroponte said he was mainly concerned with putting as many laptops as possible in children's hands. He lamented that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the XOs, saying Sugar 'grew amorphously' and 'didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way.' For instance, the laptops do not support Flash animation, widely used on the Web. 'There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community,' he said. 'One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist.'"
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