OLPC ‘Give One Get One’ Program Extended Thanks To Overwhelming Success

The One Laptop Per Child project's "Give One Get One" offer has been extended through the end of the year, which means there's still time to pick up an XO laptop for yourself and someone in a developing country.

The promotional offer kicked off two weeks ago and was originally scheduled to end yesterday, November 26, but due to the demand it has been extended through the end of the year.

Why not just make it a permanent offer you ask? One of the many fine and growing number of questions we'd like to hear founder OLPC Nicolas Negroponte give an intelligent answer to, but so far he hasn't. One XO fan has even started a site devoted to convincing the OLPC project that selling XO's is a really good idea, but Negroponte still plans to kill the program come Jan 1.

In the end, even if the OLPC ends up being somewhat less than successful thanks to a strong inclination toward self-destruction, if nothing else, at least it seems to have spurred other manufacturer's into action.

As our Epicenter blog writes:

Negroponte successfully kick-started a market for super-cheap laptops and software for the Third World, and it turns out that plenty of people in the First World are interested too. Unfortunately for Negroponte, the OLPC does not appear to be firmly in command of the market it created, and may even lose out to its much larger competitors. Meanwhile, Negroponte is looking like an anti-competitive egotist, carping about competition from Intel and admitting that he has no plan for providing long-term support for these computers. Talk about losing sight of the big picture.

Still, at least now you have to the end of the year to join in what might be the OLPC's best idea — the “Give One Get One” offer.

[via Techdirt]

See Also:

• OLPC Laptops Available In The U.S. With “Give One Get One” Program
• Hakon's OLPC
• The OLPC's $100 Laptop Now Costs $188
• Updated — OLPC Still Open Source, Project Insists