In the past year the idea of Romania joining the One Laptop per Child program has been raised in the parliament and covered by local media a few times. The powers that be are divided on this matter but both sides seem to miss the point of the program. Their arguments focus on the price and the performance of the machine which is quite understandable if you think about what the normal IT market is driven by, but pay no attention to the tagline 'It's an education project, not a laptop project'.

In December the project was refused by the parliament, and among the reasons against it were that the whole country would need to be wired(!), that the machine does not run MS Word, that the laptops would only start being produced in 2008, and that they have a unique supplier. Such arguments could be easily countered on mailing lists but unfortunatley politics are not as democratic and interactive as online communities.

As an alternative, those opposing the laptop proposed spending the money on buying 'real computers' for schools even if that meant fewer. That means buying computers from existing partners who have been providing the same pricey and not necessarily good quality equipment for years, bundled with Windows and other proprietary software.

Two weeks ago Nicholas Negroponte met the prime minister, demoed the XO machine and everyone including the media seemed impressed so the matter was on the table again.

However in the parliament it got rejected, the reason again being that it's a toy and not useful. What is different though is that the proposed alternative is no longer to buy PCs but providing the students with 'real laptops' which have more memory and faster CPU thus obviously better.
The OLPC has been advertised as a 160$ laptop (no idea where that figure comes from), and the alternative is a 260 Euro one running Windows, as seen in the video (Romanian only) .

Others propose giving out vouchers valued 160$ and let students buy whatever equipment they want. Clueless.

So at least the idea that kids and professors having their own laptops is no longer disputed, but rather who should produce them, OLPC or the existing IT oligarchy of Intel and Microsoft partners. Still, both sides miss the point that the strength of the XO is its openness and the collaborative educational software on it that can make the users more creative, inquisitive and communicative. Apparently what the politicians care about is forming a new generation of office workers or IT specialists, not necessarily better educated individuals on the whole.

I've been meaning to make a localized Ubuntu CD for Romania for a while. It is finally done but I got carried away and besides romanian/hungarian l10n it includes the firmware for the Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL driver which is common around here and other crack like ntfs-3g, network-manager, codecs, flash, Beryl and xmoto - hi Jonathan ;) . The CD is based on 6.10 synced to latest from edgy-updates and edgy-backports. It's called Kiwi, and it is registered in LP for bugtracking. http://kiwi.startx.ro/ .