Is there much in the way of good educational free software available for the laptop?

I think I'll turn the question around here: is there much in the way of good educational software available for any platform, particularly for young kids in the developing world? Unfortunately, the amount of good educational software is small on all systems, particularly for children who are pre-literate or just learning to read.

Since most kids in the world only get 5-6 years of elementary education, much/most of the existing educational software is of actual little use, particularly when seen in light of Ethnologue Web site. For example, there are 347 languages used by one million people or more in the world. There are examples of localization done by much smaller languages than those with a million speakers; in open source systems, this can be done by any small group of motivated people.

Kids learn by doing, with each other, and with their teachers (and teachers are not just school teachers!). I recommend to your attention our user interface guidelines.

You will see that from the base up, our system is aimed at enabling collaborative applications: browsing the Web together, chat, playing music together, and applications where kids learn by doing. Sugar is providing this infrastructure, to make developing such applications much easier.

This is not "just another desktop" system.

Where will the software and content all be coming from?

There is a significant amount of what I'd call "conventional" educational software for Linux already available (see http://k12edcom.org/ and http://k12linux.org/contents.html). There are major projects such as LinEX in the Extremadura region of Spain. You can look at http://richtech.ca/seul/ for an index of software. Also see such software like etoys. Adapting much of this work to our Sugar environment is usually easy.

For content, there are resources such as the wikipedia, wikibooks, conventional text books (many governments own the rights to the books they use), publishers, and so on.

And let us not forget the schools and kids themselves.

We are hardly starting from scratch: the basic technologies we use are those of free software systems: the Gecko rendering engine of Firefox, GTK+/Pango/atk, and so on. The very fact that open source and free software can be localized without asking anyone's permission is a great aid; in fact, this project would not have been possible in its current form five years ago, had it even been possible to build the hardware; it has taken the evolution of the software, and the communities around it world-wide to make a dream such as ours possible.

And will the focus of these applications be on static or interactive education?

Both; there will continue to be a major place for "received wisdom", as traditional text books, encyclopedias, and the role the literature of the world have served, and in interactive education as well. The OLPC laptop works well for reading books; our screen is much higher resolution than a traditional laptop (200dpi!), and the size of most books. The computers are much more economical if they can replace traditional books, which are a major expense (and limitation on where a child's interests can lead them). Internet access changes the availability of books from those on hand (often few in most schools) to what kids actually need and interest them when they need them.

Interactive education, particularly collaborative creative activities, is very powerful as well. It is important to see that children and their teachers also create as well as consume content; with the internet, this content can be shared and improved.