OLPC XO-2 goes Open Hardware

I admit to being a little gobstopped by Nicholas Negroponte’s announcment in the Guardian that the next generation OLPC will be Open Hardware is a pretty big deal.  I picked up the announcement this morning from Make Magazine editor, Phil Torrone’s twitter feed in which he says “This is pretty much the biggest news of [...]

Action Talks, Armchair Pundits Walk

It is remarkable how polarised the discussion of the OLPC has become.  You either love it or hate it.  I have already said my own say about the value of the OLPC but there is one point that I don’t think has been emphasised enough.

From my perspective, what is insufficiently valued in the discussion about [...]

The OLPC Effect

he One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project comes in for a lot of criticism for being, among other things, “centralised and top-down”. Critics also argue that academia and philanthropy should not be interfering in areas where the market is clearly in a better place both to innovate and to sustain new technologies in the marketplace.

I [...]