Good news from the One Laptop Per Child program: the successor to the ambitious, but ultimately outmatched XO laptop will be open source hardware. Hopefully that will encourage adoption, imitation, and customization, leading the XO-2 to be hopefully more of a success than the XO.
Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the project, says:
The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google – we’ll want people to copy it. We’ll make the constituent parts available. We’ll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.
Sounds like the right approach to me. And if the pictures are to be believed, the clamshell dual-touchscreen thing may actually be a reality.