The OLPC program is moving through a rough time right now with the announced departures of initial key members and the new Microsoft announcement to bring XP onto the XO Laptops.
Walter Bender, former President of OLPC has launched Sugar Labs to promote the use of Sugar on more devices. Sugar is open source and I’m running it on my Powerbook via VMware’s Fusion. Sugar Lab’s approach: children should not be forced to learning a legacy operating system designed for adult computer programmers.
Lets face facts. XP is not designed for the world’s children living in poverty. The design is simple and perfect for children:
Sugar was designed to be used by children with no previous access (or understanding) of computers, but rather a fresh, new focused approached designed to intelligently and easily bring advanced tools to their attention:
Sugar will have a difficult time but I believe in their work and I’m sure many agree that Sugar is an OS designed for children. Think about that.
Tags: OLPC, Sugar Labs, Walter Bender, XO, open source, globalization, trends