$100 Laptop (OLPC)

Jim Getty has an interesting post on my favorite subject, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. He has scrounged together more technical information about the laptop and offers advice on how and why to develop programs for it. Here's a snippet:

What does this mean to you, an open source developer?

  • With
    luck, a huge new audience for your software all over the world; maybe
    of order 100,000,000 in ?07, if everything goes really well (there are
    about 1 billion school-age kids on the planet, and others want the same
    kind of hardware for more commercial use). Governments want to buy
    these by the shiploads. Their motivation is obvious: distributing
    conventional books is expensive, and all you get is a book. A computer
    at the $100 price point, if it can last 4-5 years, can be justified on
    that ground alone, much less the other uses of computers, such as the
    web, VOIP, email, IM, etc.
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