Yesterday at iMeme there was a large discussion on the XO Laptop, being produced by the One Laptop Per Child initiative, a non-profit out of MIT--with the goal of getting a low-cost laptop to as many children in the developing world as possible.

Some iMeme participants felt that children don't need computers that will easily break, but food. Others thought that the laptops will enable education which will create human capital which will create jobs and help end famines.

Here is what Jimmy Wales had to say on the XO Laptop this morning:

"I think the XO laptop will have an enormous impact. I have visited tools in townships in Africa that had Wikipedia on their computers. They have a local copy--they don't have the internet. And that's fine because it's freely licensed. The sharing happens left and right all over. There are groups coming together to write opensourced textbooks."

OLPC made peace with Intel today, one of the former major opponents.

From their mission:
"Most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade.

The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation—just like their parents—never knowing what the light of learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, their governments struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy, hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonweal, because it lacks the tools to do so."