[OLPC India] Partnering with OLPC in India

[Walter Bender]

> If you happen to have done your homework correctly you would notice,
> there has been plenty of debate on it in the past. Forget an
> organization, no country has
> "ordered and received" as many XOs, not even close to it. A few
> countries pulled out of the OLPC pilots and moved to Intel Classmates or
> other low-cost laptops for the very same purpose. Since the rather now
> infamous statement from one gentleman about the OLPC initiative being
> that.. "it's an educational project and not a laptop project" doesn't
> seem to hold good anymore.

I don't speak for OLPC any more and have not been in the loop
regarding their plans for Inida, but for what it is worth, you have
several factual errors in the above paragraph.

Both Peru and Uruguay have ordered in excess of 100000 laptop and as I
understand, Uruguay has not just received, but has already deployed
more than that number.

I have heard of no country that has pulled out of an OLPC trial in
order to order large quantities of Intel Classmate PCs. There is one
alleged large order for Classmate PCs on the books, but those machines
have not been delivered AFAIK and the country to which those machines
are to be delivered never had an OLPC pilot.

That said, let's all work together to make this an "education
project". We at Sugar Labs have been working hard to make sure that
children can have access to a great learning experience regardless of
what hardware they receive. While there is a growing Sugar community
in India, we need more developers, support engineers, translators,
activity developers, and most important of all, out reach to
educators. Recall that Sugar is based on the principles of free and
open-source software--it is deliberately designed for local
appropriation!! Seize the opportunity for the children of India and
the world.


-walter