The disjointed efforts & lack of care for the most common use modes are jarring. The inability to get hardware promises really delivered sucked. There were som

The disjointed efforts & lack of care for the most common use modes are jarring. The inability to get hardware promises really delivered sucked. There were some really good & powerful underlying OS concepts that I think we ought have deep reverence for. Even if the hardware-layer 802.11s wifi mesh didn't work, the systems-layer link-local XMPP mesh, used to create Telepathy Tubes, was ultra-advanced systems engineering that just worked, that was supremely well engineered by discerning sharp choices. There's so many examples of really smart really sharp visionary engineering. To tick off all the places a complete rebuild of the computing experience failed is cheap and easy. Of course there were a lot of pet project hanger-ons, a lot of non-core engineering. It's just a pity we live in such a scarce, chased society, where such a novel engineering project failed to garner the love & attention it deserved. If there's a reason OLPC failed, it's as much because the rest of the world failed to show up for some bold visionary open source engineering. And in my personal view, it's because open source was already chiefly a husk, a shell, for industrial software development. I don't think the world ever really engaged OLPC at the level it deserved, we all failed to explore a delivered viable greatness & make it our own (a difficulty amplified how long it took for Sugar builds to be available on other platforms). The positive powerful lessons XOPC had for us weren't understood or appreciated then, and we're still today hooked on sad story of failure. Rather than anyone bothering to understand the victory & success & power that was built. Out of best of breed open source systems[1]. Effectiveness could have been higher. But this project chose great tech, & it feels as much like an indicator of failure by the geeks who should have seen further. It's hard to form open source community, but there were so many good ideas here, and just a little more getting-the-ball rolling would have lead to a radically different song we sing about this. There was an incredibly interesting platform for software development in a class-room scale, extremely well envisioned, and we all failed to rise to the high standards of possibility this new, vanguard capability set out for. [1] https://www.aosabook.org/en/telepathy.html https://www.aosabook.org/en/telepathy.html