Eclectic Amateur

Free Software hackers, large technology corporations, and Third-World governments co-operating to make computers truly affordable for the vast majority of the world? Jim Gettys gives more details in this blog entry, $100 Laptop / One Laptop Per Child:

There certainly was a lot of publicity last week on the unveiling of the “green machine” OLPC prototype in Tunis last week; google news showed into the hundreds of articles world-wide.

Here is the minimum description of the hardware we expect at the moment. I say minimum, as events and commodity prices may change plans, and delays sometimes mean you get more than the minimum:

• AMD x86 Geode processor, at least GX2 @ 500mhz, but very probably something later, faster and lower power, with the more interesting companion chip (e.g. support for USB 2).
• 128 meg RAM; think cheap, rather than high performance
• minimum of 512 meg flash
• built in 802.11 wireless (probably a Athleros chip, due to its advanced driver), with mesh networking.
• 4 USB ports
• keyboard and large touchpad, which can be put on the back of the display, so you might use it as an e-book
• display (more below; it is novel, and the most likely component to cause delays and interesting consequences to open source software)
• crank generator & batteries; you get to work for your computing

What it doesn’t have:

• fans or heat sinks (saving power, cost and weight)
• disk drive (they are fragile, expensive, and unreliable, and eat power)
• any I/O expandability other than USB
• any hardware/flash expandability

What does this mean to you, an open source developer?

• With luck, a huge new audience for your software all over the world; maybe of order 100,000,000 in ‘07, if everything goes really well (there are about 1 billion school-age kids on the planet, and others want the same kind of hardware for more commercial use). Governments want to buy these by the shiploads. Their motivation is obvious: distributing conventional books is expensive, and all you get is a book. A computer at the $100 price point, if it can last 4-5 years, can be justified on that ground alone, much less the other uses of computers, such as the web, VOIP, email, IM, etc.
• Doing stupid things in your programs can make it hard to put the processor to sleep or use more power than need be. In the case of this machine, this translates to real work to do (think cranking).

Read the whole thing, especially if you are interested in the technical details. If this can be pulled off, I think it has the potential be as disruptive as the original PC introduction. (Whether you think that’s a good or a bad thing is, of course, a separate issue.)

In case you’ve never heard of Jim Gettys, he’s one of the original architects of the X Window System from M.I.T. (this is the basis for the GUI for nearly every Unix or Linux system in existance), and has a resume that makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my career and life.