Ivan Krstić — OLPC Perspective
Ivan Krstić provides perspective in his post “This, too, shall pass, or: Things to remember when reading news about OLPC.” Interesting reading. Reality does not match the doom and gloom judgment og OLPC that’s sweeping the net.
[tease]
To those on the outside and looking in: remember that, though he [Nicolas Negroponte ] takes the liberty of speaking in its name, Nicholas is not OLPC. OLPC is Walter Bender, Scott Ananian, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Mark Foster, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Mary Lou Jepsen, Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Michael Stone, Tomeu Vizoso, John Watlington, Dan Williams, Dave Woodhouse, and the community, and the rest of the people who worked days, nights, and weekends without end, fighting like warrior poets to make this project work.
Nicholas wasn’t the one who built the hardware, or wrote the software, or deployed the machines. Nicholas talks, but these people’s work walks.
Remember that even when Nicholas talks, it is all to be taken with a fistful of salt. The SD card slot didn’t get added to the XO for Microsoft, as he is fond of saying, but because we were getting terrible read/write performance with our solid-state storage. Hardware architect Mark Foster designed a dedicated chip to speed things up; that chip, as an unanticipated bonus, made it easy to attach a camera and an SD slot.
Nicholas’ recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way” is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success. The organization decided to move anyway, and extended me a written offer to take over as Chief Software Architect. Nicholas rescinded the offer unilaterally several weeks later, for reasons he refused to explain to anyone.
So yes, there was no [OLPC] architect, but that’s because Nicholas didn’t want one. If he believes that’s the cause of Sugar’s problems, he has no one but himself to blame.