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20071129 Thursday November 29, 2007
OLPC: How's This For Prior Art? Computers

Perhaps you've heard that the One Laptop Per Child group is being sued by a "Nigerian entrepreneur" because he claims they stole a keyboard design he invented.

What, is the 419 scam business slowing down?

Here's what he claims:

 

[The plaintiff] said his company spent seven years developing the Konyin Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard, which can easily reproduce the unusual punctuation marks used in dozens of Nigerian languages and dialects.

For example, many words require accent marks placed over letters. This is usually done by adding special software to the keyboard, as well as an extra "AltGR" key rarely found on US keyboards. A user who wants to type an accented letter E hits the AltGR key and some other key.

 

Is he saying he invented the AltGraph key?  This key rarely found on US keyboards...

Except for every Sun Microsystems keyboard!!

Here is the Nigerian layout of the OLPC laptop:

Nigerian keyboard layout

 

And here is (part) of a Sun Type 5 keyboard (Photo courtesy Wikimedia.com):

Sun Keyboard

 

So, if he really is claiming adding two shift keys is his invention, I submit this as evidence that he's full of it.

More evidence that he's full of it?  Here's a link to what the "stolen" keyboard looks like.  Compare it to the OLPC keyboard and you'll see that's they're not even similar.

Here's another take on the story.
 


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November 29, 2007 02:17 AM PST Permalink | Comments [2] | del.icio.us technorati slashdot digg reddit facebook stumbleupon

Comments:

Yeah I read that and did exactly what you did - googled the company and compared the keyboards.
But as I read it, he's not claiming to have invented the Alt Graph key, he's claiming to have invented the Compose key, and the country-specific keyboard.<P>
Hopefully this is just a cheap way of generating publicity for his company and he doesn't go through with it. If he does go through then I hope that Sun offers OLPC the use of any of the thousands of patents that we own in a countersuit.<P>
Of course this is Nigeria that we are talking about. It could all be some kind of elaborate 419 scam.<P>

Posted by Dave Tong on November 29, 2007 at 08:00 AM PST #

AlGraph, Compose, they're both there.

Posted by Kevin on November 29, 2007 at 08:33 AM PST #

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