Intel manipulates the news for One Laptop Per Child

Intel, fine, upstanding corporate citizen that it is, decided the world needed an "independent" news source to cover One Laptop Per Child. So it did. Or, rather, one of its employees did and called it something innocuous like "One Laptop Per Child News."

The hitch? That same employee works on an Intel-sponsored project that competes with OLPC:

You can shrug your shoulders and simply ignore the blog, but Christopher Blizzard, one of the OLPC's contributors and a [former] employee for Red Hat, looked a little bit further. It turns out that one of the site's authors works on an Intel project that is competing with the OLPC. Oops.

A blog is just a blog, right? Wrong. Even if we take that as gospel, it's still a bit slimy for Intel employees to be slurring a competing project under the guise of impartiality. I'm biased, but at least I admit it.

[desnotes]

II have been to the site and it is also decidedly anti-OLPC. Some of the articles even start out objective but by the end they are always finding fault. I came across the site a few weeks ago after getting my XO laptop but after one visit I have not gone back. Now it makes sense why it is so negative.

[theopensourcerer]

Having just showed off some OLPCs at the worlds largest technology in education show (BETT) here in London last week, we saw the competing products (EEEpc and Classmate) and I can honestly say they have nothing on the XO.

The entire concept of the XO from the start was to build a device for education and for children. The competitors are basically shrunken adult computers.

The big irony relevant to your original post Matt, was that we got the OLPCs after the CEO for Nigeria saw an article we published on olpcnews.com: http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/mesh_networking_bett_london.html. He contacted us directly and loaned us several for the show. Tomi Davies is his name and I couldn't have met a nicer bloke. If the rest of the OLPC foundation is like him, then the commercial products don't stand a chance in education...

And that is a big point - the OLPC is not-for-profit. The EEEpc and the Classmate are definitely of the For-profit variety. I know which product I'd want my education budget (derived from taxation so it is our money) to go on...

[Wayan - OLPC News]

Matt,

While SlashDot may be fast and loose with a year-old conspiracy theory I would expect better from a CNet writer. Now you'll just have to read OLPC News and realize you were the fool: http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/olpc_news/olpc_news_conspiracy_theory.html