The One Laptop Per Child project hopes to lower the cost of its laptop for developing nations to $50 by 2010, Nicholas Negroponte said in the opening keynote at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston.

The first units are scheduled to ship in December this year or January next year at an estimated cost of $135 per unit. Technological advances are expected to bring down costs to $100 by 2008 and $50 by 2010, Negroponte told delegates.

One Laptop Per Child is supported by the United Nations and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Negroponte heads up the Media Lab.

It hopes to ship five to 10 million units in 2007 to Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Nigeria and Thailand.

The project was kicked off in January 2005. Although the technology is the most visible aspect, the project is not about creating low-cost hardware, according to Negroponte.

"The $100 laptop is an education project, not a laptop project. The motivation is to eliminate poverty," he said.

Scale is key to getting a low cost laptop, he claimed, because it creates a market for the low end hardware that is needed for the project.