Sad to see OLPC’s for sale on eBay at inflated prices

Our OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) laptop has arrived at home in San Francisco - sadly we’re not able to get our hands on it because we’re still in the UK for the conclusion of our Christmas break.

We were one of the people who elected to buy one for our own use in return for buying one as a gift for a child in a third-world country (which, btw, you can still do up until the end of 2007).

As part of my research to gauge initial reaction to the device (to whet my appetite before unboxing ours), it has been sad to come across a load of auctions on eBay for the device - some with ‘Buy It Now’ prices as high as $650. Don’t forget the original offer was $399 for two laptops, with one going as your gift to a developing nation.

Unless everyone selling their laptop above the $200 per unit price they originally paid is planning on donating the profit to the charity-status OLPC Foundation (which they would no doubt state, as they’d get their listing fees paid for by eBay) then there’s some pretty despicable people out there.

I’m not against people buying Wiis or PS3’s and selling them above market rate on eBay - that’s just economic forces of supply and demand at work. But to profit in this way from an offer from a charitable organization to drive adoption in the third-world seems very crass to say the least.

Given that you can actually still buy an OLPC under the $399 buy-2-get-1-give-1 scheme (at the time of writing, at least), one can only assume that the prevalence and dollar value of such auctions will increase on the 31st Dec 2007 when the opportunity closes and the scarcity increases.

So please don’t buy an OLPC from eBay unless you know that any profit is going back into the foundation.