Gregory's Server(And thank you all for being kind and respectful in the comments thus far. The OLPC was (and is) a defining part of my private and professional life. I was only involved on the sidelines but I met people that ware so deeply invested into the ideas. Developers. Children. Teachers. But also aggressive opponents, lobbyists that did everything possible to kill the project. It teached me a lot. And I still feel sad it never lived up to its potential. Maybe it will. I'm still a believer) Me, 2007 :)
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 @jwildeboer I never got to see one in person. I did get to buy a knock off from HP and installed Ubuntu on it. Used it for web development. The ideas sparked from the OLPC live on.  @wtrmt Whenever you're in Munich, happy to meet and bring one or two along for you to fiddle with :) @jwildeboer wow! That is so kind of you! Regards from a fellow nerd, from far away, in Chile. I hope to go to Germany and meet you! @jwildeboer we gave away OLPC machines at linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne. I was also a huge fan of the program and sorry it did not reach its full potential. But I believe it changed computing. Cheaper laptops made it more accessible to more people. The eepc and chromebooks came after. Iβve lost track of whatβs happening with sugar. I should revisit it all. @kattekrab "The little machine that could" will always come to mind whenever I see one :)  @jwildeboer I'm still sad on a regular basis that the PixelQi technology died on the vine. @jwildeboer I've loved learning your behind the scenes stories on the OLPC, today. The device may not be in production, but the dream behind it lives on. @jwildeboer Thank you so much for sharing this. Amazing things I didn't know.  @CGdoppelpunkt It's still around :) In total around 3 million laptops have been distributed over the years. https://laptop.org/aboutolpc/ @jwildeboer Ik herinner het me. Wat een prachtig idee was het. En hoe jammer dat het zo werd tegengewerkt. Maar wat hielp het de boeren!!!  @Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: what has become of this initiative? i haven't heard anything about it since quite some time ...
https://laptop.org is still around, though I havenβt been in contact with them since years. They distributed around 3 million laptops to children in total. Mostly unnoticed by us here in the west.  @jwildeboer The ending of Red Hat's involvement in that project was also seemingly marked by the end of Red Hat trying to bring Linux to kids in general. It was really sad to me because if things had been different, Fedora might be the reference platform for the Raspberry Pi instead... @Conan_Kudo We continued to support Sugar on a stick for many years in the Fedora community. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_on_a_Stick The main reason we didnβt became the default OS on the raspberry is that it isnβt really an open platform, IMHO. @jwildeboer @Conan_Kudo Not really, no. Any x86 machine is less open than a RaspberryPi, and I don't see Fedora having a problem with that. @jwildeboer wow, never knew it was that many. Thanks for giving some more background info on that project; I knew of it, bit not a whole lot about it. (as expected, the naysayers and opponents are now in the comments trying to turn my thread into negativity. As always. Well, I still hope I could give some of you some positive food for thought on unintended, but fascinating effects that we observed many years ago when the project started.) @jwildeboer To counterbalance the naysayers. OLPC was one of the projects that happened early in my time when I got interested in open source and it was always a project I found extremely interesting. @jwildeboer I hadnβt realized you were involved in that - amazing! And what a great story. Thank you :)  @jwildeboer I remember Microsoft doing its best to kill off cheap, affordable, widely available Linux laptops. What a horrible thing it was to watch this and how it was killed. |
@jwildeboer I would call this the "BytesWagon"
Compute/Comm for the masses!