Sometimes copying is not that bad when it comes to taking the responsibility to provide simple, durable laptops to needy children. The non-profit project, OLPC - One Laptop Per Child - takes an initiative to release and open-source its design so that others could copy it and produce laptops at a very much affordable price. But is there a black cloud in this silver lining?With the price of higher end laptops dropping rapidly, the early mission of OLPC was to make simple laptops with a price tag of $100. But the price went high to nearly double of that amount as they could not achieve the economies of scale with only half-million OLPC machines in use till date. They expect it to rise to 5 to 6 million machines every month around the world with several companies in the market producing them.

With the laptops based on Linux model, the OLPC may hand off the development of its Sugar operating to the open-source community. Also the group said that it would be working with Microsoft to make a Windows variety of its XO laptop, in addition to the original Linux model.


Technicalities apart, we will not like to see OLPC fall short of accomplishing the goal they came here for. And I am sure you won’t either.