Nicholas Negroponte, who runs the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has
confirmed in a wiki post that hard times have hit the OLPC effort. The organization will be cutting its staff by 50 percent and giving salary reductions to the remaining 32 people on board, according to Negroponte. Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources, he says. OLPC will continue to work on a version 2.0, and there will be efforts to pass the Sugar platform onto the community, but the once-ballyhooed low-cost laptop inititiative is a shell of what it was intended to be.
