Computers for the developing world
Feb. 8th, 2007 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenI've just been reading about the interesting new security system for the One Laptop Per Child project. It's called Bitfrost (a weak pun on "Bifröst", I suppose) and it aims to tightly restrict the privileges on every application on the machine, so that apps can't do anything that isn't essential. Puts the onus on the app developer instead of the user, which is probably a good idea, especially in this area. As its author says:
But I'm wondering. I'm not actually a big fan of the OLPC idea. Whereas it's a great, laudable notion, I think that existing charities such as Computer Aid and Computers4Africa are doing something more sustainable: recycling discarded Western business machines and shipping them to schools in the developing world for free, rather than expecting impoverished, corrupt developing-world governments to pay $250 (eventually dropping to $100) each for millions of kids to have their own computers. Great idea, but flawed logic, I feel. Surely it's generally better to recycle and reuse than to build anew? And in the West, millions of perfectly functional computers go into landfill every year. That's a waste. Waste is always bad, I feel.
One of the snags of the ComputerAid (&c) efforts are that in large part they're putting closed commercial proprietary software on those machines. They're locking the kids into the same vicious circle of dependence on big western profit-making companies that we already have here in the "developed" world.
I really much prefer efforts like the RULE Project and Ubuntu Lite, which aim to strip-down leading Linux distros into something light enough to install on old PCs and have run in a fast, stable and secure fashion. And no, telling people to just install 10y old distros is not an answer. Old PCs are perfectly capable of running modern software if it's done right.
Which has led me to wonder...
Is there any point or relevance in creating a special version of the OLPC's cut-down Fedora with its Sugar GUI, designed to be installed on vanilla PCs? So that for areas where they're too poor to afford OLPC machines, they can run the same software on donated hardware?
"How can you expect a 6-year-old to make a sensible decision when 40-year-olds can't?" Krstic asked in a session at the RSA Conference. Those boxes simply train users to check "yes," he argued.Well, indeed.
But I'm wondering. I'm not actually a big fan of the OLPC idea. Whereas it's a great, laudable notion, I think that existing charities such as Computer Aid and Computers4Africa are doing something more sustainable: recycling discarded Western business machines and shipping them to schools in the developing world for free, rather than expecting impoverished, corrupt developing-world governments to pay $250 (eventually dropping to $100) each for millions of kids to have their own computers. Great idea, but flawed logic, I feel. Surely it's generally better to recycle and reuse than to build anew? And in the West, millions of perfectly functional computers go into landfill every year. That's a waste. Waste is always bad, I feel.
One of the snags of the ComputerAid (&c) efforts are that in large part they're putting closed commercial proprietary software on those machines. They're locking the kids into the same vicious circle of dependence on big western profit-making companies that we already have here in the "developed" world.
I really much prefer efforts like the RULE Project and Ubuntu Lite, which aim to strip-down leading Linux distros into something light enough to install on old PCs and have run in a fast, stable and secure fashion. And no, telling people to just install 10y old distros is not an answer. Old PCs are perfectly capable of running modern software if it's done right.
Which has led me to wonder...
Is there any point or relevance in creating a special version of the OLPC's cut-down Fedora with its Sugar GUI, designed to be installed on vanilla PCs? So that for areas where they're too poor to afford OLPC machines, they can run the same software on donated hardware?
