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: (more…)