OStatic

Pity the poor One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Though the project has sold about half a million of the cute little green boxes with a custom Linux-backed user interface, they're widely viewed as a failure. Key people behind OLPC have recently left, as well, as Reuven noted. There are various reasons for all of this: coming out of the gate at double the planned price and completely missing their own optimistic shipment projections (18 months ago they were talking about shipping 10 million in their first year of production).

But could open-source fundamentalism be the root of the problem?

The $100 laptop project, otherwise known as OLPC, has faced a large number of setbacks since it was initially unveiled several years ago. The most recent such problem just occurred, when Walter Bender announced his resignation.

Did he leave because the project might abandon open source software? And what does this mean?