OLPC could have "sought a license and gotten it for a minimal fee," Lancor CEO Adé Oyegbola proclaimed. "We're hoping … they can come to their senses, and we sit down and come to a reasonable settlement." If the matter doesn't settle quickly, Oyegbola threatened a U.S. patent suit.

The keyboard has four shift keys, instead of the regular two. The extra shift keys afford generating accent marks, tildes, umlauts, and other various symbols that middle America has little use for.

OLPC was founded by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte to donate computer laptops to children in developing countries.

Lancor's lawsuit alleges that OLPC bought two Konyin keyboards and reverse engineered them for the source code used in OLPC's XO Laptops. "They took our code and made it open source for all the world to see," Oyegbola lamented, with lamentable failure to comprehend that the quid pro quo of a patent is to reveal secrets in return for a grant of exclusivity.

Asked about the goals of OLPC, Oyegbola, a Nigerian citizen, observed that laptops can be useful to children in Africa, but many have more basic needs. "Children might not need a laptop; maybe instead they need a classroom."