Third world countries have many problems to overcome. Some can be overcome by sending aid money to those countries, setting up wells, hospitals, schools and food programs, but not all of the problems can be solved in this manner. As the saying goes: “Give a person a fish and feed them for a day, teach them to fish and they will feed themselves indefinitely.” Getting these developing countries into the modern world and teaching them how to survive and indeed flourish in such an environment is the key to their prosperity. To do that you must logically begin with the school age children as they are the ones that will be in the position to take the countries forward. To that end, the founder of the MIT media lab, together with AMD, Google and News corp are putting together plans to supply a 100 dollar laptop running the Linux Open Source Operating System, to be purchased by governments and supplied to school children in the developing countries. Building a complete laptop for only 100 dollars is a serious challenge as often single parts are worth most of that amount, (like the screen for example). The likely specs for such a laptop would be somewhat lower then existing mainstream laptops but not so much that they can’t be used for most of the same things most of us use our computers for, (not counting gaming of course).

By using Open Source software like GNU/Linux, the makers avoid the heavy cost of software licenses, and as an added bonus, they avoid the vast majority of spyware and virues problems that plagues the Windows world. From an Open Source perspective, the good news is that whole new generations will learn and use Free (as in freedom) Open Source software and will become valuable additions to the OSS world once they are educated.

The units are expected to be ready for distribution by late 2006 or early 2007. Read the MIT media lab site on the project for more specific detail, or see this nice Wired article on the subject.

This article was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2005 at 8:12 am