The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative wants more kinds of Sugar, and some developers are not sweet on that notion. Sugar is the user interface created for the low-cost laptop developed by a team headed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte. The XO laptop, originally intended for a price point of $100 and incorporating an open-source Linux operating system, is designed for use by children in third-world countries.

Sugar for Windows

that week, Negroponte indicated that Sugar is not only a great interface for Linux, but for Windows as well. “Sugar is a very good view, less than perfectly executed,” he wrote in a posting on an OLPC site. It needs to be “disentangled,” he said, from collaborative tools, ability management, and other functions, so it can be modularized and evolve more efficiently.

He is additionally seeking to have it run on top of Windows, which has soured the enthusiasm of some for the XO. The

laptop, whether sold in the tens of millions worldwide as originally envisioned and whether based on Linux, could become a key driver in moving that open-source operating system toward popularity on the desktop.

Negroponte has confirmed that OLPC has been in discussion for several months with Microsoft about a dual-boot version of the XO. In October, a Microsoft executive told news media that the company was spending “a nontrivial amount of money” on adapting Windows for the XO.

Negroponte, in his e-mail, said “some purism has to morph into pragmatism” as the organization reaches out to engage a wider community, and it is “absurd” to propose that “forsakes open source or redirects our mission.”

Dissent in OLPC

Some of the developers upset about the current direction are inside OLPC. On Wednesday, OLPC developer C. Scott Ananian posted a reply on the organization’s site, in which he publicly criticized…

Orginal post by Top Tech News