NetworksOLPC Chief: Our OS Was Our Biggest Mistake.
It"s been a while since we"ve heard anything from Nicholas Negroponte but the OLPC chief recently aired his grievances about the OLPC project and it seems that he is not at all pleased with the Sugar UI that runs on all XO laptops.
In a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Negroponte was asked about the mistakes made with the XO laptop and OLPC. Negroponte noted that putting the crank handle on the machine was a mistake, however he said the biggest mistake was using Sugar as the operating system.
Negroponte explained that the company should have offered Sugar as an application running on a regular OS.Ò
"Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system," he told ZDNet Asia. "But what we didò€¦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 went on to say that the move by Sugar Labs to offer Sugar on a USB stick was "much cleaner" and added that with this development, we could see a "naked" XO laptop sometime in the future.
What do you think OLPC"s biggest failure has been to date? Let us know in the comments below!