Pity the poor One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Though the project has sold about half a million of the cute little green boxes with a custom Linux-backed user interface, they're widely viewed as a failure. Key people behind OLPC have recently left, as well, as Reuven noted. There are various reasons for all of this: coming out of the gate at double the planned price and completely missing their own optimistic shipment projections (18 months ago they were talking about shipping 10 million in their first year of production).
But could open-source fundamentalism be the root of the problem?