Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab fame, still trying to remain relevant, has announced a program called One Laptop Per Child, which wants to mass produce fully-loaded Linux laptops for schoolchildren in the dveloping world.

Given what happened here in Atlanta when Apple tried to sell Macs for all the local schoolchildren (the plan was rejected and the superintendent pushed out) it will be interesting to see where this goes.

Negroponte's plan is to build low-powered units, 1 GHz chips with cheap LCD screens used in DVD players , and minimal storage (use the Internet instead) but the underlying problem, even if he can get things rolling, will remain.

That is:

How do you keep the design stable?

Moore's Law means that the parts for today's $100 laptpo will be quickly replaced by new, better parts. Keeping the design backward-compatible is essential, for at least three years, so that the kids aren't crushed by repair costs, and so the kids with this year's laptops are stuck with mionimal envy next year.

AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat have all agreed to help, and the hope is to have a prototype ready in a year, with 100 million units produced the following year.