Well, if you haven't heard of the OLPC . (i.e. One Laptop Per Child) It is a association that is trying to develop a low-cost laptop (the $100 laptop) to use to educate children in third-world countries. Basically they are trying to bring the information era to the door-steps of countries like Peru, Mongolia and some countries in Africa. People of this organization believe that if you bring information / technology (i.e. www) to the less developed countries that are suffering from war, corruption, and disarray, It might bring future peace. The strategy of the OLPC is to bring this technology to the child in hope that by doing this it will bring some kind of future peace as well as an array of other things. (Education, knowledge, The power to think for themselves.)
Recently posted on Diggs.com and Slashdot.org:
OLPC Responds to Intel Breakup (Diggs.com)
Why Intel and OLPC Parted Ways (Slashdot.org)
About 6 to 8 months Intel Corp. joined the OLPC as a member of the association. The OLPC was trying to get them to help them out in building a low cost, low power consumption microprocessor chip to put into the OLPC low-cost laptop. But for some reason they parted ways now and these two blogs describe Intel as a ruthless big corporate thug that doesn't care about the people but just the market it sells its chips to. Now both of the blog posting are very one sided (in favor of OLPC) and I tried finding Intel's argument as to why they drop-out of the OLPC. But I couldn't find a blog that sided Intel in either of the blog sites. I did though find a link in the blog from slashdot.com that took me to a CNET.com blog that gave more of a perspective on why. I guess Nicholas Negroponte asked Intel to stop making its Classmate PC while it was part of the OLPC. This seems to be one of the sources of friction between the two groups and probably is why they parted ways. But it doesn't really go into any depth as to why Negroponte asked this of Intel.
The diggs.com blog wrote this, "Intel contributed nothing of value to OLPC: Intel never contributed in any way to our engineering efforts and failed to provide even a single line of code to the XO software efforts - even though Intel marketed its products as being able to run the XO software. The best Intel could offer in regards to an “Intel inside” XO laptop was one that would be more expensive and consume more power - exactly the opposite direction of OLPC’s stated mandate and vision." This was from the head of the OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte and just by reading this you could get a really sense as to his frustration and disappointment towards Intel. It is kind of sad that things couldn't work out. Intel could of really contributed to the future success of this project. Not saying that they won't be successful without them. It just would of been great to have the leading microprocessor company evolved.
Overall, I am sure it is a sad day for the OLPC when they couldn't reach an agreement with Intel. But it must of been a good day when AMD was asked to be involved in the project and supply a low cost, low power consumption chip and hopefully help the OLPC towards their goals. We will have to see what the future entails.
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