The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation began with a
noble goal of providing a laptop to each child in poor and developing nations
that otherwise would not have access to a computer. The intention of the OLPC
foundation was to improve the education of children in third-world countries.
The OLPC has had significant changes and setbacks with its
XO notebook. The goal originally for the XO was a cost of $100 per unit. That
cost figure increased several times and ultimately the XO
notebook ended up with a price tag of $188.
The OLPC then had production
delays that threatened availability of the notebooks for the holiday
program “Give one, Get one” that the OLPC planned. The XO notebook
finally entered production only to find that it had to fight
with Intel, who sits on the OLPC board, for market share against the
Intel’s Classmate notebook.
More trouble is brewing for the OLPC foundation with The Boston Globe reporting
that a Nigerian company called Lagos Analysis Corp. has filed suit against the
OLPC for patent infringement in Nigeria. Lagos Analysis Corp. holds a patent on
a multi-language keyboard in Nigeria that allows the reproduction of punctuation
used in the dozens of Nigerian languages and dialects. The keyboard is notable
for having four shift keys.
The extra shift keys produce accent, tildes, umlauts and
other symbols. Ade Oyegbola, founder and chief executive of Lagos Analysis
Corp, says that Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT professor that founded the OLPC,
purchased two of the company’s keyboards in August of 2006. Oyegbola alleges
that the OLPC copied his keyboard verbatim in its XO laptop and tried to hide
nothing.
OLPC executive Robert Fadel told The Boston Globe, “OLPC has not seen any legal papers related to
the alleged suit as of this time. OLPC has the utmost respect for the rights of
intellectual property owners. To OLPC's knowledge, all of the intellectual
property used in the XO Laptop is either owned by OLPC or properly
licensed."
Oyegbola says, “They can either do the right thing, sit down
like they sat down with other companies and negotiate a royalty, or they can
just stop." Oyegbola also says that the OLPC reverse engineered his
company’s software and placed it on its website for the whole world to see.