Speaking at the TED 2009 conference, One Laptop per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte has said the future of the initiative — which set out to put simple, durable, low-cost laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in developing nations — is to become, in essence, more commonplace, to "build something that everyone copies".
That copying has already begun, Negroponte said, pointing to the surging popularity in recent months of netbooks — laptops built by a range of commercial PC makers with a focus on low cost and simplicity of design. "They didn't copy the right things from us, but they exist," Negroponte said, according to Ethan Zuckerman, blogging from TED. "We had to build the first laptop because no one else would do it."
In the early days of the OLPC, the group's design became famous as the "$100 laptop", after the target price set for the device, but over time the price crept up to nearly double that level; the $100 price tag would have to wait for economies of scale that proved elusive. Meanwhile, even before the advent of netbooks, the price of higher-end laptops kept dropping.
Given the pressure from commercial markets, Negroponte said the OLPC would release and open source its hardware design and invite others to copy it, according to Zuckerman. Within three years, Negroponte expects companies around the world to be cranking out some five million to six million such machines every month, compared with about half-a-million OLPC machines now in use.
In May 2008, as the OLPC sought broader acceptance, the group said it would be working with Microsoft to make a Windows variety of its XO laptop, in addition to the original Linux model.
In January, amid harsh economic conditions, the OLPC announced that it would be cutting its workforce by 50 percent and cutting salaries for remaining employees. It also said it would hand off development of its Sugar operating system to the open-source community.
