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Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.
A new installment of ‘As the laptop turns” tells of the off again/on again relationship between OLPC and Intel, with Paul telling his side. It makes me thinks of the old WAR song “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”
I think if either side wanted to take the ‘high road’ they’d work together, form a coalition to bring laptops to developing countries with a variety of platforms available. They can show them all together, make their pitches and then accept the results. Monopolies are bad. Diversity is good. Interoperability is necessary. Any position that wants to ‘control’ the situation has problems, IMHO. Let’s be friends 
Paul Otellini tells Intel staff about the OLPC affair - The INQUIRER
“I give you this information to help you in the context of the OLPC saga. Some people at Intel criticized Nicholas’s project when it was first started. That was a mistake, and we have long ago apologized for that. Last summer, I contacted Nicholas and asked him a question. It was ‘is your goal to get every kid a laptop, or to get every kid an OLPC laptop?’ He laughed and said ‘the former, of course.’ With that answer, I said we would like to work together.
“Intel signed a contract with OLPC. We provided the organization with $6M of funding in 2007, and were their largest single source of funding. We were working on porting our software to the XO, and were working on an Intel-based version of the product. Last fall, Nicholas demanded that we drop our work on Classmate (this fact was reported with a quote by Nicholas in the Wall Street Journal). He felt that our work was causing less success to OLPC as a competitor. I reminded him of his answer to my question when we talked in the summer. He disregarded it and said that he had changed his mind. Intel could not and would not withdraw our support to governments and the small computer manufacturers in developing countries who were building Classmate. Nor would I bow to his pressure to grant OLPC a ‘monopoly’ on kids. At the time of our breakup, Intel had honored every contractual commitment we had made to the OLPC organization.
“Despite the fact that Nicholas and his team have been all over the press telling their side of the story, we have elected to take the high ground and not lower ourselves to refuting his lies.
