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Over the past two decades, multimedia pioneer and college professor Nicholas Negroponte has gained a reputation for producing outsize ideas. Chief among them was his goal of providing 150 million of the world’s poorest children with inexpensive laptop computers by the end of this year through the One Laptop Per Child organization. But, with the group far short of his goal, Negroponte is looking for help in piloting OLPC. During an interview with BusinessWeek, he revealed publicly for the first time that he’s searching for a chief executive while he continues in the role of chairman. He says the organization has been operating “almost like a terrorist group, doing almost impossible things” for three years. Now, he says, it needs to be managed “more like Microsoft.”
The CEO search comes amid a retrenchment for the organization that Negroponte started three years ago. OLPC will hand more of the development and support of its XO laptop and its core software to technology companies, including Red Hat (RHT), the leading distributor of the Linux open-source operating system, and Microsoft (MSFT), which is just now putting the finishing touches on a version of Windows for the XO machine. OLPC will concentrate on developing prototypes and other new concepts. “In the end, we should not be in the hardware or software business. We should be in the learning business,” says Negroponte, 64.
So what happens when Matt Asay interviews Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst?
Sparks fly, that’s what.
Q:Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?
A: I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.
Q: You’re serious?!
A: Absolutely.
Q: Are you a geek or something?
Do I have to throw away my iPod now?
Intel drops out of One Laptop Per Child program: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
“The OLPC board ‘had asked Intel to end its support for non-OLPC platforms including the Classmate PC and other systems,’ Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. ‘They wanted us to focus our support exclusively on the OLPC system.’”
Edward R. Murrow: Who owns the patent on this vaccine?
Jonas Salk: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?
See It Now, April 12, 1955
And from a 2005 New York Times thinkpiece about intellectual property:
When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in 1955, he waived the patent process because he wanted to protect the public as quickly as possible and thought it far more important than making money. When the vaccine was first introduced, the United States had an average of 45,000 cases of polio annually. By 1962 there were 910.
Those crazy old timers had some quaint notions back in the 20th century.
Intel Joins One Laptop per Child: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Intel and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) today announced they have agreed to work together to bring the benefits of technology to the developing world through synergy of their respective programs. Under the agreement, Intel and OLPC will explore collaborations involving technology and educational content. Intel will also join the board of OLPC.
More on this soon.
UPDATE
BBC: Intel and $100 laptop join forces
Chip-maker Intel has joined forces with the makers of the $100 laptop project.
The agreement marks a huge turnaround for both the not-for profit One laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation and Intel.
Intel, `$100 laptop’ project make peace
BOSTON - The nonprofit that aims to seed the developing world with inexpensive laptop computers for schoolchildren has made peace with Intel Corp., the project’s biggest and most powerful rival, The Associated Press has learned.
A narrative is forming around Microsoft’s patent FUD campaign, and it’s not a paean to their business acumen, nor an ode to their brinksmanship. The real story is more of a folktale-in-progress that turns on a simple dramatic question: What is Red Hat going to do?
FOSS activists like these at BinaryFreedom.info see Red Hat as an “important domino” and say,
Don’t let Red Hat fold! | binaryFreedom.INFO
We have seen Microsoft’s FUD cause our comrades to pay for patents and intellectual property that doesn’t exist and if Red Hat caves in, many more will follow. Let’s rally our support behind Red Hat to make sure it doesn’t happen! […] Let’s make sure that everybody at Red Hat knows they have the FULL backing of our community if they stand up to Microsoft’s FUD and they have NO backing from us if they don’t.
Amnesty International has launched a campaign to bring attention to the growing threat to Internet freedom posed by governments (and acquiescent IT companies) around the world. Unfortunately, it’s a growing problem that needs more attention.
Irrepressible.info is a user-fed news aggregator documenting instances of censorship and persecution for sharing information and other threatening online activities like “reading” or “looking at” forbidden content. There’s even a place where bloggers can find html fragments of banned content to post on their blogs in order to demonstrate that information cannot be repressed.
It’s not as if this issue needs much explaining, but Cory Doctorow’s usual editorial prowess in support of Irrepressible.info is on full display in The Guardian.
Mitchell Baker is floating a draft (Version 0.9) of a Mozilla Manifesto on her blog, and the Mozilla Foundation is backing it up with some cash for the Democracy (soon to be called Miro) Video player, a creation of a shadowy outfit called the Participatory Culture Foundation.
According to seth’s blog, the PCF Miro video player is “is a cool desktop application that’s sort of a mashup of a video player, an RSS reader, an FTP & torrent client, and a channel guide — the experience is that video is regularly delivered to your desktop. They also make a server and have built a ton of great docs to help you get started as a video publisher on the web.”
The Mozilla grant to PCF follows a similar grant to Creative Commons.
Although there are ten principles listed in the manifesto, and 60+ pages worth of comments to be found in the Mozilla Governance Google usenet group, the thrust of the Mozilla mission is “to provide choice and innovation on the Internet.”
So far, the success of Firefox and Thunderbird have shown what comes of following through on high ideals, providing open source advocates with a prime example of the power of common sense, open standards and collaboration.
With any luck, the Democracy/Miro video platform could be a significant step in further realizing the vision expressed in Mozilla’s manifesto.
From the Memorial Day edition of the New York Times.
Since last year, the military’s embedding rules require that journalists obtain a signed consent from a wounded soldier before the image can be published. Images that put a face on the dead, that make them identifiable, are simply prohibited.
If Joseph Heller were still around, he might appreciate the bureaucratic elegance of paragraph 11(a) of IAW Change 3, DoD Directive 5122.5:
“Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without the service member’s prior written consent.”
According to the Pentagon, the rules were put into place to spare the families of the fallen from the added pain and anguish that might come from discovering the loss of a loved one through the media. Ostensibly, the restriction doesn’t cover un-embedded journalists, but the Iraqi police, enforcing a 1-hour press ban after each bombing, recently fired warning shots over the heads of working press trying to do their jobs.
Fair enough, but it means responsible citizens may have to dig a little deeper to remain informed, and a lot deeper to understand the reality of what our fighting men and women are facing on our behalf.
Fortuantely, there are other ways of finding out what one needs to know.
In a brazen attempt to undermine Microsoft’s recent patent infringement sabre-rattling (and perhaps to call attention to an ambitious open source documentary project) a shadowy (compliment) outfit called Digital Tipping Point has started a Sue Me First, Microsoft wiki for open source users to line up for a chorus of bluff-calling.
As of today at 9:45 AM, EDT, the Sue Me First, Microsoft wiki had 906 signatories supposedly just itching for some hot patent litigation
DTP’s Christian Einfeldt says on the wiki “We are asking that people include their name, email address, version of GNU Linux disto(s) being used, and a short statement explaining why you are using that distro.” and adds that although he is a lawyer, he is no way offering legal advice and does not practice patent law.
Some of the comments people are leaving attached to their names are pretty funny.
Digital Tipping Point also has a nice collection of over 400 short films and videos about the free and open source software movement available at the Internet Archive.
Quicktime | Real
Real Stream | Ogg Theora
Internet Archive defeats ‘National Security Letter,’ Makes it public
Open Source Initiative Responds to OLPC article.
Patent law: It’s not rocket science.
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