One Laptop Per Child Talks

Jim Gettys of OLPC

Jim Gettys delivered the opening keynote about the One Laptop Per Child project at Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM 2007), a 2 day event, recognized as "The best Free and Open Source events in Europe."

Below is a transcription of Jim Gettys, "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) keynote introducing the children's laptop from One Laptop per Child - a potent learning tool created expressly for the world's poorest children living in its most remote environments.

The full video program is on olpc.tv and a related interview is here.

Announcer: member of the board and also Vice President of software of the One Laptop Per Child Project. He will of course speak about One Laptop Per Child. Jim.

[Applause].

Jim Gettys: Thank you. This is a picture of a school in rural middle of nowhere Cambodia. It's about six hours to drive there. Nicholas Negroponte built a couple of schools, a few years ago and discovered that the cost of the laptops was really expensive. The cost of the fuel for the generators for the laptops was really expensive. It was quite eye opening.

One thing I will start with is I want to try and reset peoples of view of the world here. The first problem when the kids were given laptops was in persuading the parents to let them use the laptops when they were taken home because the laptops were worth more than the houses that were going home to. Once they got past that point, the next realization of a day or two later was for most of these kids this was the first time there was any artificial light in their house.

That's the bulk of the world. Most kids go home at night to houses with no electricity and no light.

OK. This is sort of what I'm going to cover in this talk. In some sense, this being a geek audience, I'm going to try to explain to you why we designed the machine the way we did. We've got the luxury that Linux people typically, and free software people have not had of actually being able to design our own hardware from close to scratch. This has allowed a set of freedoms in design that you typically don't have has allowed us to go in directions that you can't normally do in the Microsoft ecology at least not unless you are Microsoft.

There are realities about hardware design that people don't fully appreciate. It's very different from software. There are realities of what ingredients you can actually get to make your sausage. You can only make as much sausage as you can actually get the ingredients for. It isn't like software where you can always run off a few million more copies. It just doesn't work that way.

Some parts of the recipe you can substitute and those are called second sources. But other parts, you can't. They are single source suppliers and if they stop being able to make your component you're in real trouble. If you make a lot of sausage, you can actually get some custom ingredients made. Depending on how long in advance you start depends upon how unique and new the ingredient can be.

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