The OLPC initiative is pioneering software as well as hardware. Both Apple and Microsoft made high-profile overtures to the OLPC project, offering their operating systems for free. But both were spurned in favor of Linux, because OLPC engineers wanted an operating system that could be regularly fine-tuned without charge.

So the machines will be delivered with a specially modified version of Red Hat Linux. Red Hat tweaked its Fedora Core Linux to meet the unusual needs of the project. One of them is reversibility. “Children must be allowed to play,” one of the project documents notes. Any mistakes they make that cause a machine to become unstable, the document explains, have to be easily reversible, perhaps through something as simple as a reset button.

The OLPC team also constructed a completely new user environment, code-named Sugar, designed to break down the isolation that students might experience from staring at laptops all day. It introduces the concept of “presence”—the idea behind instant-messaging buddy lists. The user interface is aware of other students in the classroom, showing their pictures or icons on the screen, allowing students to chat or share work with others in the class [see photo, “Sugar, Sugar”].

The system shares with the other students new tasks, like a drawing or a document, by default, though students can choose to make them private. Sugar creates a “blog” for each child—a record of the activities they engaged in during the day—which lets them add public or private diary entries. The laptop will come with drawing and music software.

With Sugar, the team consciously avoided the desktop metaphor, a decision that has drawn surprisingly widespread support. For one, it is time to break away from the decades-old desktop and windows metaphor and try something new, some argue. And, they say, what better place to do this than in the developing world, where people don't have desks to begin with.

That's the OLPC group's vision of low-cost computing. But whether that vision will lead to success or failure won't be determined until the first wave of their computers reaches developing-world schools. And that has some people worried.

“In principle, the OLPC will create a mass migration of technology into the hands of the people who need it,” says Cascio of Worldchanging.com. “But I question whether there will be the kind of support necessary from the governments. I'm not so worried that the money will come from the mouths of the hungry—I worry about government focus. Will the government of Libya, having given computers to schoolkids, say, ‚ÄòWell, we've done our part—we don't have to do anything else; if these people don't better themselves now‚Ķforget them.'‚Äâ”

Indian economist Dey is concerned with government corruption. “If we have 1 million laptops to distribute among a population of 100 million, who will get them? Whoever pays the most,” he insists. “People will make money giving these away, and they will go to the haves. It will increase the divide between the haves and the have nots.‚Äâ”

Geekcorps's Vota sees the costs to the countries, even at $100 a unit, as a major problem. He calculates that Nigeria, with approximately 4 million schoolchildren, would spend 73 percent of its entire annual government income to equip them with laptops, without even considering the costs of educational software, teacher training, or connecting those laptops to the Internet.

The OLPC organization, by contrast, presents the laptop as a bargain. It states in its documents that providing laptops is faster and less expensive than building and equipping schools and hiring and training teachers.

So widespread teacher training is not part of the rollout plan. Some training is likely to be available, but for the most part, the OLPC team envisions teachers learning about computing and the Internet alongside their students.

“This,” says Felsenstein, “is a radical rejection of institutional education. And when the teachers find out that they are considered obstacles, not part of the process, they will resist the process.” He pictures the laptops being used not in the classroom, but outside the schools, without the supervision of adults. And this worries him.

“Unsupervised adolescents will likely get into trouble,” he says. “They'll use them for illegal activity, gang activity, criminal activity. At best, when the adults find the kids getting into trouble, they'll take the laptops away; at worst, there will be a breakdown of societies.”

Cascio envisions a less apocalyptic, but still troubling, scenario. He thinks some teachers will simply sell the laptops and use the proceeds to buy books.

And, it seems, OLPC planners have anticipated that scenario, too. The computer isn't housed in a brightly colored case just to appeal to children; when it is in an office, it will be obvious that the machine has been taken from a child. But even proponents acknowledge that there will be a black market for them, along with reimportation to the developed world.

But as the Berkman Center's Zuckerman sees it: “This won't be a huge problem if the school systems that distribute them assume, say, a 5 percent loss annually and can easily replace them. It will be a disaster if the loss of a laptop ends a child's educational career.”

And the computers will fail and will need to be repaired. Because the design team eliminated moving parts, the creators expect repairs to be minimal, but, Bletsas said, screens will indeed occasionally break and will need to be replaced. He expects the development of a repair infrastructure to happen organically.

Zuckerman agrees. “My experience in the developing world is that repair networks develop informally,” he says. “In every African village, for example, is at least one person who repairs cars. With so many identical computing devices distributed, I'd be surprised if people didn't get good at repairing them very quickly.”

The developing world won't really feel the impact of the OLPC's massive distribution of low-cost computing devices until they've been in children's hands for five to six years. At that point, the people leaving the school system for the working world will be used to having computers. They will likely demand them in their work lives, potentially transforming the economies of their countries. At least, that is the hope.

Unfortunately, says Zuckerman, there is another possibility: “If these students graduate into economies that are not ready to change, that don't begin the transition to information societies, their exposure to computers will have given a whole generation of students the skills they need to get out of their countries. No country that will participate in this project will think that they are inviting their children to leave, but that indeed may happen.”

Will the $100 laptop change the world for the better? “That,” says Vota, “is the $30 billion question.” For better or for worse, the experiment is about to begin.