who's familiar with OLPC

I know some people from opencraft are involved in the OLPC work, dunno if anyone else is.

OLPCs insistence on selling at the scale of millions and to governments only is among it's weakest points. we attended the first presentation of OLPC in cairo and the Egyptian government's reaction was worse than what the articles u link to convey

I remember clearly that the first question asked by a senior employee of the MCIT was "what does microsoft think of this?"

without delving too much into politics or making accusations let's just say that the Egyptian government considers microsoft not only as a primary vendor but as a partner and ally and is unlikely to sink alot of money in any ICT program that excludes microsoft (is in fact unlikely to commit to any program without consulting microsoft).

the 2nd question asked was how to finance this purchase, again OLPC is missing how governments work in our part of the world. these kind of programs in egypt are always done through aid, corporate sponsorship or some other form of foreign funding, don't expect the ministery of education to come up with a 100 million dollars out of it's own budget.

egypt will buy XO laptops when they are sanctioned and at least partially financed by microsoft. and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

Alaa

husband of the Grand Waragi Master