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Negroponte's OLPC Offer Shows Staying Power of Open Projects

It's quite amazing what is going on with new hardware devices designed to meet low price points. In one of the latest examples, One Laptop Per Child chairman Nicholas Negroponte has pledged full access to the hardware and software assets of his nonprofit organization to support the Indian development of a $35 tablet computer aimed at students. The news follows the announcement of plans for the devices from India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal.

Negroponte, in an open letter to the Times of India, wrote:

"One Laptop per Child applauds Minister Kapil Sibal for promoting a $35 tablet. Education is the primary solution to eliminating poverty, saving the environment and creating world peace. Access to a connected laptop or tablet is the fastest way to enable universal learning. We agree with you completely. Please consider this open letter OLPC’s pledge to provide India with free and open access to all of our technology, and our experience with 2 million laptops, in over 40 countries, in over 25 languages. As a humanitarian and charitable organization, we do not compete. We collaborate, and invite you to do so, too."

Now that is a friendly, charitable letter, and it illustrates something that the many nay-sayers didn't realize when criticizing the OLPC effort: It's extremely common in the open source world for an initial idea to find itself without wings, and then flourish and fly in a metamorphosized new version. It's entirely likely that the OLPC assets are exactly what Indian developers need to deliver a good device at a low price point.

We covered this exact phenomenon in depth in our post on metamorphoses of open source projects. Negroponte's open letter is more evidence that the "never say die" properties of good open source projects remain alive and well even when version 1.0 doesn't achieve spectacular success. 

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