[Colombia] Noticia sobre OLPC

Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero dirakx at gmail.com
Fri Jan 30 19:31:37 EST 2009


Hola

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/01/29/olpc-20-after-layoffs-one-laptop-foundation-reboots-with-new-focus-and-big-plans/


Por favor leer los comentarios sobre todo este..
*
paul* 1/29/09 7:31 pm Nick Negroponte killed the OLPC movement. 100% of
OLPC's support infrastructure is volunteer-based, and OLPC deliberately
keeps them in the dark about everything. Bug reports get marked invalid if
they're not filed by an OLPC insider. Serious, crippling wifi problems have
gone unresolved for years (in many cases, even untriaged) while they focus
on supporting CD-ROM booting for Windows. The Windows-centric BIOS emulation
routines are closed-source and under tight NDA. Sugar sucks because nobody
bothers to fix it; they just identify one or two problem areas a year and
completely rewrite everything. The stylus part of the touchpad has never
worked. They never addressed the stuck-keys problem. Spare parts are
expensive and hard to acquire. They ship the things locked-down securitywise
and expect users to manually enter things into a website and wait days for
permission to install other operating systems. The rationale for that last
bit is "the G1G1 users are our test bed." Dozens of support volunteers have
dropped out because the support crew is expected to handle basically all of
the public relations, even though they don't know anything and aren't
authorized to speak for OLPC. Hundreds of e-mails from people willing to
help go unanswered and are eventually deleted because OLPC fundamentally
doesn't give a damn about anyone who isn't a direct employee of the company.
The last handful of companies that Chuck Kane ran were all sold off or put
under soon after he took the reins. OLPC has an undisclosed number of NDAs
with Microsoft, Marvell, Quanta, and other companies. They ignore offers of
help from major open-source figures, and then complain about how long it
takes to develop software. QA is backlogged by about six months, and doesn't
have a testing regimen in place anyway, and probably never will because it's
run by the same pack of in-the-dark volunteers who valiantly try to provide
end-user support. Kane explicitly dropped the education mission of OLPC, and
claimed it was now basically about distributing laptops and to hell with
what is done with them. Regardless, OLPC (in keeping with Negroponte's
amazing hubris) will only deal with national governments, and the few
programs that are getting the machines into the hands of whatever schools
want them (the Give Many program) never took off because (again) nobody at
OLPC gives a crap. Basically, Negroponte started out with a great idea, then
made every possible wrong decision and turned it into a steaming pile of
failure, and it's pretty damn depressing.

Puede que tenga cosas exageradas, pero en general es lo que sentimos los
voluntarios acerca de OLPC.

Rafael Ortiz
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