OLPC’s open source qualms underscores a larger limit

It’s all very noble. MIT researcher and pundit Nicholas Negroponte challenges the PC industry to develop and sell a $100 PC for poor countries so their populations can be computer-literate and thus more able to compete in a global economy. He then puts his money where his mouth is and establishes the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, which then develops a $200 laptop to help achieve those goals.

Early on, OLPC decides to go open source, to save money on the software on these ultracheap PCs as well as to get a leaner OS than what the commercial world offers. Less intensive equipment is needed, reducing costs even further.

Now we see that OLPC may switch to Windows XP, as Negroponte says that the open source Sugar GUI on the Linux-based OLPC is inferior in several ways, including being able to run the Flash files common to educational Web sites.

Negroponte is right to move away from the utopian vision that led OLPC to an all-open-source-based approach. Kudos for trying, but the OLPC experience shows that good intentions don’t necessarily lead to good software.

Look how long the concept of desktop Linux has been around: a decade. Now look at how few desktop Linux PCs there are. Red Hat and Novell have pulled away from the consumer-oriented desktop Linux development, leaving Ubuntu to cheer on the cause to its small clique.

With all the antipathy toward Microsoft over the years, you’d think the open source community could have developed a credible desktop OS and related application stack during the past decade. But it has not.

For OLPC’s original open source goals to be realized, the open source community needed to come together and champion desktop Linux for real. Instead, it remains the same mess of incomprehensible GUIs, hardware incompatibilities and extremely limited application options. It would be cruel to subject kids in any nation to that as their primary computing experience.

Open source has a very mixed track record. There are considerably more failures than successes. That’s OK — commercial offerings have high failure rates as well. But open source, I believe, is more prone to failure because without a string champion who can both envision the right software and then deliver it as code, the open source project succumbs to multiple agendas and apathy. That’s essentially what Negroponte criticized Sugar for.

Linux was essentially the creation of Linus Torvalds, who then brought it to the community for refinement. Without Torvalds’ foundational effort, I don’t think that Linux would be as popular and useful as it is today. Other open source successes — Apache, JBoss, Firefox — had similar leadership and commitment up front.

In the case of an alternative to Windows and Mac OS, the open source community has not shown that leadership or delivered on that vision.

Fortunately for OLPC, Microsoft has decided to keep a very inexpensive version of XP available to poor countries, one whose hardware requirements are not nearly as high-end as what the regular XP version (or Mac OS X) would require. Had Microsoft not done so — and it’s key to note that Apple has not done the same — the failure of desktop Linux could have doomed the OLPC effort. With Microsoft’s XP Starter Edition, there’s still a chance for its dream to come true.

The desktop Linux community — at least those who support the Sugar and OLPC efforts — feels betrayed by Negroponte. But they betrayed themselves. The open source community likes to cite the wisdom of the crowds, but it often suffers from the tragedy of the commons.