OLPC's losses

The OLPC project has lost two major technical figures, Walter Bender and Ivan Krstic.
You will surely remember Krstic, since I once posted a video of his talk presenting the project at GOOGLE, and in another post I wrote about his work deploying OLPC in Peru.

Walter Bender was kind enough to answer a question of mine about OLPC’s situation in Cuba.

Walter was Director of Content, and president of OLPC.

Ivan was the project’s director of security, and the main creator of BitFROST.

In a post on his blog Ivan gives the reasons for his resignation. Basically, the project’s change of direction is not compatible with his personal ethics.

bq.Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project. Adding insult to injury, I was asked to stop working with Walter Bender, without a doubt one of the most stunningly thoughtful and competent people I’ve ever worked with. Following Walter’s demotion from OLPC presidency, I was to report instead to a manager with no technical or engineering background who was put in charge of all OLPCtechnology.
I cannot subscribe to the organization’s new aims or structure in good faith, nor can I reconcile them with my personal ethic.

Bender, for his part, has always been in favor of OLPC’s solutions being based entirely on free software, as he puts it in his farewell note:

The OLPC Association is making headway getting laptops into the hands of children and it is encouraging to see that other non-profit and for-profit organizations are following suit.

My personal interest is in helping build a community of developers, educators, and learners dedicated to advancing the quality of free and open source software for learning and the sharing of pedagogical approaches in this community by adopting the spirit and methodology of the open-source movement.

Could it be that there is more pressure for the OLPC project to favor a solution based on Windows XP over the Linux+Sugar platform?

What is Negroponte thinking, and what is he after with these changes?

Clearly the focus will be a different one, more practical, but at what price?