We are the lucky and happy recipient of a XO laptop. The laptop very cool anyway one breaks it down. It runs Sugar OS, a custom version of Red Hat’s Fedora Core 6, and only comes with free software. It is aimed at kids, mainly outside the US and Europe, as an educational tool. But OLPC has a ‘Give one Get one’ program; so when someone buys a laptop for a child in the US, OLPC ships one to child in Haiti, Peru or Africa.
I think OLPC, exposing kids to Linux, programming language and free software, has the potential to inspire a generation of kids to be non-consumers and innovator. I am thinking of a generational difference between Gates and Jobs as opposed to the dudes who started Google. Gates and Jobs defined themselves against IBM and simply wanted to sell their products; the Google dudes, who probably owned computers as a children and were familiar with unix, programming language and computer clubs, seemed to be concerned with innovation aimed at computers users and not just consumers.
An so I hope OLPC coninues this program long enough to see its effects.
