Walter Bender comments on his departure and future plans

Walter Bender, who left the OLPC Foundation recently, gave an interview to Xconomy.com Walter explained his reasoning for leaving the project. His main dispute was the deemphasis of Sugar and going more mainstream with Windows as an alternative operating system.

“If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers,” Bender told Xconomy in an interview Thursday. “Personally, I think that…a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them. But that is a minority opinion [within OLPC], so I left to do my own thing.”

He plans to promote Sugar and help developers who are developing Sugar based applications.

X: When you say “agnostic about learning,” what I take that to mean is that there’s a feeling that the XO Laptop should run Windows, and not just Linux and Sugar.

WB: I think it’s pretty obvious and was obvious from the very beginning that it’s a lot easier to cater to people’s comfort than to be disruptive. Nicholas had that wonderful quote in BusinessWeek about a month ago—that OLPC is going to stop acting like a terrorist and start emulating Microsoft. If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers. And that’s a marketing strategy, and one that I think has been adopted by many laptop manufacturers. Personally, I think that the customer is not always right, and that a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them. But that is a minority opinion, so I left to do my own thing.

X: Okay, so talk about how you’ll actually take Sugar and keep growing it, and get it onto other platforms.

WB: There are two parts to it. One part has to do with continuing the momentum around the project. And there’s lots that needs to be done. It’s a generation-one product, and it needs to grow and evolve. But there’s a second piece to it, and that is, how do you actually support this in the field. It’s not mature enough yet to be completely self-supporting. While that is certainly a goal, it’s a difficult goal to achieve. I spent a lot of time in Peru working on the Peru deployment [of the XO Laptop], and one of my goals in Peru was to build a lot of redundancy around support. That’s fundamentally a social problem, and how you solve it is an enormous challenge and one that I’m really interested in. So there is a technical piece and a social-cultural piece and both of them are passions of mine.

The exact form or framework to work on those problems is to be determined. I’m having a number of conversations with people about maybe hosting the program at a university or setting up another foundation, or maybe even setting up something that is a for-profit, open source project. There are a lot of ways of doing it. Maybe there will be multiple ways. I don’t own this, and don’t have any intention to own it. I think the redundancy of that approach is probably important as well.