XO Goes On Sale November 12

I wouldn’t mind purchasing a couple of these, one for my kids and one for a needy child somewhere else, if I was given the choice of where that “needy” laptop would go. What do they use as their priority for sending a laptop to a child? Why would their choice be any more beneficial for a child than mine? Just askin’.

Inexpensive laptop computers designed for students in developing countries will be sold to the public in a buy-one, give-one scheme, the non-profit organization behind the project said Monday.

The “100 dollar laptops” — which currently cost nearly twice that amount — will go on sale for two weeks starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) said in a statement.

The non-profit group was organized by Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, who came up with the idea of providing low-cost computers for students in underdeveloped countries as key step to promote education.

The sales program is designed to give the overall OLPC project more publicity, and to encourage open-source software developers to write programs for the laptop’s operating system, the non-profit said.

At $100 a pop, it definitely isn’t running the Apple or Microsoft operating systems. So what is it running? According to this site, it’s operating system is based on Linux. Duh.