The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It's all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.

"I quit when Nicholas told me -- and not just me -- that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward," writes Krstić.

Nick says of Intel: "They were selling laptop with their brand on it directly to exactly the same people we were talking to. They would go in even after we had signed contracts and try to persuade government officials to scrap their contract and sign a contract with them instead. That's not a partnership." Apparently OLPC had six million dollars on the way from Intel before they scrapped the partnership, but Nick Neg had had enough. "Each time it happened they said they would correct their ways. It's a little like cheating on your spouse, or alcoholism, or something you just can't eventually fix and we had to finally part ways." Intel sees it differently, of course. "I don't want to get into specifics but we met every obligation that we were committed to," said Intel's Paul Otellini, who called Negroponte's version of events "hogwash." Intel's version of the story states that OLPC wanted Intel to drop its non-XO projects, namely Classmate PC. This was obviously always an awkward union, given the respective organizations' competing products, but you'd really hope for a bit more maturity in the breakup given the fact that this is all, you know, for the kids.