OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte: Sugar was ‘mistake’

One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte talked to ZDNet Asia about some of the bumps in the road for his Cambridge-based nonprofit’s XO laptop. Notably, he says it was a mistake to use fellow MIT Media Lab cofounder Walter Bender’s Sugar as the XO’s operating system.  

“Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system,” he told ZDNet Asia in an interview. “But what we did…was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management–it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess.” 

Negroponte added: “It should have been much cleaner, like the way they offer [it] on a stick now.” 
The availability of the Sugar interface via a USB could possibly herald a “naked” XO laptop in future, said Negroponte, currently on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Via Engadget.

Update 10:43 a.m.: I shot Bender an email for comment:

“OLPC, as does any hardware manufacturer, has to make sure that the
low-level drivers, etc., are written for their hardware. This is
generally hard work, but given the ambitious goal of advanced power
management, security, mesh networking, dual-mode display, etc., this
required an extraordinary engineering effort. But none of this had
anything at all to do with Sugar. The ‘fried egg‘ that Nicholas desired
was always there.

That said, there are a few necessary points of interaction between
Sugar and the OS from the point of view of deployments: Backup,
updates, registration, etc. These are all critical features for a
successful deployment. But these efforts hardly constitute the real
heavy lifting.

I think that in order to make it an “education project”, we had to do
all of these things. We’ve taken an iterative design approach and been
driven in large part by the direct needs of deployments, despite all
the statements to the contrary. It takes time and a community; we are
making great headway and millions of children are learning as a result
of our efforts.”

Posted by Brendan Lynch

Tags: Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child, Sugar, Sugar Labs, Sugar on a Stick, Walter Bender

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under Education & Training, Hardware, IT, Internet, Massachusetts, Public Policy, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.