BOSTON — A key person behind the $100 laptop for schoolchildren has left the project as the organization overhauls its operations and prepares to tweak its open-source approach by welcoming Microsoft’s Windows.
While the One Laptop Per Child Foundation is known as the brainchild of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Nicholas Negroponte, his longtime MIT colleague Walter Bender was a close No. 2. Bender oversaw software and content for the green-and-white “XO” laptops, whose user interface was specially designed as an educational tool.
But in March, after OLPC’s initial run of $188 laptops reached fewer children than originally envisioned, Bender became head of “deployment.”
Officially, OLPC said it was streamlining its organization because the laptop’s technology essentially had been built.
A different view came from the XO’s former top security architect, Ivan Krstic, who wrote on his blog that Bender got demoted. Krstic said OLPC was undergoing a “drastic internal restructuring” and “a radical change in its goals and vision.”
Then last week, Bender left the group. That marked a third high-profile departure from OLPC. Along with Krstic, chief technology officer Mary Lou Jep sen left in December.
Negroponte said Bender was burned out after helping to shape OLPC for two years, during which it has sold more than 500,000 laptops for children in such countries as Haiti, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Peru, Uruguay and Mongolia.
But Bender already has new plans. He hopes to launch an independent effort to further the development of the XOs’ homegrown software, known as Sugar, and get it to run on Linux computers other than XOs.
“Sugar is in a narrow place, and it is ripe to be unleashed,” he wrote in an e-mail exchange.
Sugar relies heavily on icons and other graphical features and avoids Windows’ files- and-folders format.
