News about LANCOR v. OLPC

[jason]

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Groklaw has a long and heavily annotated piece about LANCOR v. OLPC’s battle in Nigeria.

News about LANCOR v. OLPC
I know. You thought I was goofing off partying and drinking in the new year. Not really. I was reading some cynical documents just filed in the LANCOR v. OLPC litigation. Yes, it’s begun in a Nigerian court. LANCOR has actually done it. Heaven only knows it makes me want to drink. Guess what the Nigerian keyboard makers want from the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization trying to make the world a better place?
20 million dollars.

I kid you not. $20 million in “damages”. And an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria.

I read about this a while back. Lancor is a US-based Nigerian company, and they claim that OLPC infringes on their multi-lingual keyboard. Their technology is marketed as the Konyin keyboard. I’m no expert, though I know more than the average bunny about text encodings and FEPs (front end processors) having helped yuka do Japanese language processing since long before it became easy. Looking at Konyin’s technology it looks like they’ve taken keyboards and added more characters to the keys, but they don’t seem to have added anything I can’t do on a mac. And though they claim to be selling globally, they only have american and nigerian versions of their keyboard available on their site. And there’s no content or drivers on their site. Looks to me like they’re selling existing products with different letters on the m, and perhaps some driver (no info I could find) for mapping the keys. I was doing custom keymappings as just after 1997 when I was working with Icelandic educators on MOOs, using a hex-editor and off the shelf font generating software.

As I’m searching about for info on their “Shift2 Keyboard” technology there are only about 500 hits, most of which are either selling these keyboards or talking about the legal woes. Not much of a technology if there’s no discussion about it.

If you google Shift2+Keyboard -olpc -prices (that ignores all posts with the words prices and olpc), you get 18 posts.

It doesn’t sound to me as if there’s really any technology going on there. I’m not qualified to say if there is or not, but for a technology that claims to have been around since 1994… it is intresting.