The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has announced they are cutting their workforce, cutting salaries of the remaining workforce, and more. In the past year they've drifted slightly from their principle of using free and open source software.

They've decided to turn development Sugar to the community. The following links provide coverage:

It amazes me that within a few years, a graduate student's project went on to become a serious competitor for the likes of Sun, Microsoft, HP, SCO, and others after being posted on the Internet. Like many of you, I am a science fiction fan. I'm sure you'll remember the notion of "desert power" from Frank Herbert's Dune (or similar forces in the other books in the series). A central concept to this was the incredible power of passion and determination. Does passion lead to better code? Did passion help propel Linux to success?

Related to this, a recent blog posting from Tobias Lütke shared a Pop tech video that takes a particular view towards the importance of passion and hope. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I'd been meaning to share this for a while. Tyler Mitchell from OSGeo put together a listing of OSGeo projects based on data from Ohloh. If you've not visited Ohloh before, it is a web site that analyzes open source project web pages/code repositories to report on contributors and more.

The findings from Tyler's work and their implications are impressive.