The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is being threatened by competing products from major technology corporations:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2830058.shtml
(The video is on the right side of the page)

The Intel spokesperson claims it's just competition, but he neglects to mention that the OLPC folks spent 2 years researching and developing it, efforts that would essentially be stolen from them. This is not unlike someone developing a new type of TV only to have the prototype copied by a large corporation who then runs with it. What is even more galling is that the OLPC folks aren't looking to profit from it at all - they are practically giving it away at cost.

Furthermore, the OLPC can run for 10 hours and can be recharged with a hand-crank. Also, it's water-proof, has a built-in video camera, and has 10x the wireless network range. Why does my laptop not have 10x the range, or at the very least 5x? Is this not indicative of how a large enough number of dedicated volunteers can produce better technology than any private company ever could?

More specifically, isn't this a direct threat to for-profit corporations?

For example, consider the SACD format, a closely guarded, expensive, and impossible to duplicate format. But what if it was free and easy to copy? What wouldn't creative people all over the world be able to do with 5 dedicated audio channels and the highest resolution available?

Or what if HD-DVD had been available unlicensed and without copy restrictions? Even if the major studios wouldn't want to distribute their movies with it, plenty of independent film makers would. It would have taken the world by storm and we'd all be asking: Blu-Ray, is that a new species of fish?