Much love to the many readers who sent in links about Intel bailing from the OLPC effort. If you’ve not seen this yet, check out this quickie from Reuters. The Journal also has a piece this morning. Gist of the divorce seems to be that Saint Nicholas demanded that Intel drop its Classmate PC, a rival to the OLPC XO machine, and Intel wasn’t willing to do that. Also worth noting in the Journal story, if you can find it online, is the paragraph toward the end which says OLPC claims its “Give 1 Get 1” program has been successful, but declines to provide numbers.

You know the whole OLPC thing started out as this big freetard experiment with loads of rhetoric about peace and love and sharing and openness. Now suddenly they won’t operate out in the open. They won’t share sales figures. Their CTO just quit to start a company and sell OLPC technology at a profit, with no details disclosed on who owns what and who’ll be keeping whatever money gets made. Now we find out that behind the scenes Negroponte has been bullying Intel over the Classmate and trying to eliminate competition. He’s like one of these petty dictators who talks a lot of shit about democracy but only holds elections if he’s certain he’ll get 99.9% of the vote. This is coming from the guy who was raving about the wonderful free market goodness of competition back when he was telling the world how he was going to make a PC for a hundred bucks and totally fuck up all the big players in the market. Oh yeah. In those days competition was a good thing.

See, that’s how it goes with freetards. They’re like a bunch of guys with a weekend touch football team who go around talking smack about how they could totally beat the New England Patriots — and they could, as long as the Patriots would agree to the freetard rules, which is that when the freetards take the field the Patriots must stay on the sidelines, watching, and let the spastic freetards run the down field over and over, clumsily scoring points. Touchdown! Another touchdown! Field goal! My goodness these freetards are amazing! They’re beating the New England Patriots, the greatest football team in NFL history! God forbid the Patriots might finally get fed up and decide to take the field and beat the snot out of these guys. God forbid the Pats should simply do what they do, which is run, hit, tackle, block and pass. That, my friend, would constitute cheating. And the freetards would start leaping up and down demanding a penalty call.

Freetard football is what we call it. The best part is watching when they’re playing against an open field and still can’t get a first down. Negroponte takes the snap, he fades back, he’s looking, he’s scrambling, he’s under pressure from the non-existent pass rush, he’s searching, but he can’t find an open receiver … oh! He trips over his own feet and sacks himself! Ouch! That one’s gonna hurt … but wait, he’s back up now and he’s looking around for someone to blame! He’s pointing at the Patriots on the sidelines and yelling at the referee, demanding an instant replay and a penalty call …