[Olpc-open] [Edu-sig] OLPC G1G1 sales start today

[François Schnell]

On Nov 13, 2007 6:00 PM, Mark Harrison <mh at pixar.com> wrote:

> > Isn't it obvious that if OLPC let all passionate people *buy* the
> > laptop the project will have much more contributions?
>
> I think that is certainly the case, and that is what is going to happen
> with the G1G1 program.

Yes and No.

The time frame of this one time only operation is much too limited in
time and space to reach much more than the alpha-geeks people.

So what kind of contributions can we expect form the G1G1 operation?

1) Alpha-geek quick and dirty cool hacks

Sexy things like:

- strange things between an XO and a Nintendo DS
- strange things between an XO and a NXT Mindstroms
- strange things between an XO and a GPS unit
- strange things between an XO and iPhone
- strange things between an XO and (put your favorite geek toy here)

There's nothing wrong with that, it's cool but not really helpful to
the original goal of the project (not to even to mention the
environment in which the target children live).

2) Academic research contributions

Mainly PhD thesis I imagine.
Again great but not really helpful to the distribution stage of the
current project

What about the contribution from the Free and Open Source software
communities to build or adapt educational software for the XO?

Unfortunately these contributions will stay low mostly because of the
discriminatory distribution scheme.

Only a few FLOSS developers will be williing to contribute to a
project which is forbidden to certain people and countries as I
explained in a previous mail.
In view of the current distribution scheme these developers will reach
many more children by staying on a traditional PC.

francois

>
> There were a limited number of boxes made during hardware development,
> so it's not possible to give one (at whatever cost) to everybody that
> wanted one.
>
> But now it's coming available to the early adopters, so we can expect
> to see a flourishing new wave of input and creativity applied to the
> project.  I signed up for G1G1 yesterday and can't wait to start
> trying things out.
>
> (XO shipping people, feel free to put my unit in an earlier shipment than
> my coworkers, so that I can walk from office to office saying
> "hey, let's mesh... oh, you don't have yours yet, too bad you're
> not cool like me!")
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Harrison
> Pixar Animation Studios
>