Six months after Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child Project and Intel decided to ‘go it together’, the latter has announced leaving the project and resigning from the OLPC Board.
The reason, Intel says, is that the OLPC Board demanded the chipmaker stop selling its ‘Classmate PCs’ while on board the OLPC Project. In Intel’s words, the OLPC board asked it to end support to all non-OLPC platforms, instead focusing exclusively on OLPC.
The One Laptop per Child Project, the brain-child of Professor Nicholas Negroponte from MIT, has its mission statement to sell as many inexpensive ($100) laptops to poor children in developing countries.
Even before Intel and OLPC joined hands in July last year, Intel’s ‘Classmate PCs’ were always a source of tension between the two. At one point in time, Negroponte went on record to accuse Intel of “dumping” its ‘Classmate PCs’ so as to keep OLPC (XO) laptops well out of reach of needy children across the globe.
The Intel-OLPC partnership, while it lasted, was aimed at developing an Intel-based version of the OLPC laptop. But with Intel dropping-out from the OLPC Project, all that would change now.
An Intel spokesperson explained that for them, it’s never been about a single solution to get laptops into the hands of poor children, unlike OLPC.
Meanwhile, the OLPC Project hasn’t been all that successful considering it eventually required a Give One Get One program to give it that much-needed push.
