Open Source Initiative Responds to OLPC article.
by T. Colin Dodd
Damn disheartening news from OLPC | Open Source Initiative
I have no idea what pressures Negroponte is under. I have no idea what failures of leadership, vision, or courage have occurred, are occurring, or are at risk of occurring at the OLPC project today. It would be irresponsible to jump to too many conclusions based on a single article. But if OLPC abandons its open source roots, then I do not see the project accomplishing any of its goals. And while I can afford to throw away the three XO laptops I bought, the world cannot afford to throw away the goal of ending poverty in favor of preserving monopoly control of technology.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy fanatic, but it makes you wonder how windows is getting in on this. I am going to go ahead and say Microsoft blackmailed the president, threated a few people, and won the battle.
now about those Russian submarines in the Gulf of Mexico…
April 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Very well said.
If it really is true, then I’d be humiliated for going to events on promotion of OLPC. I once thought of this as pride.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Wow! So just because Negroponte made a statement about OLPC running Windows he must be “under pressure”. There’s NO WAY he’s making a true statement? And the comment above, “But if OLPC abandons its open source roots, then I do not see the project accomplishing any of its goals” is ABSURED. Come on! You’re actually of the opinion that Open Source software is the only way out of world poverty? Can the poor children of the world NOT be educated if they are to use the Windows operating system? I’m all for OSS but come on now. Making statements like this can make us in the OSS community seem like cry babies who can’t compete.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Well, this is happening with bad behaving monopolies. MS should have been dealt with accordingly to its monopoly abuses, according to antitrust laws (my opinion: make Windows and Office source code and licensing available to competitors, so as to create competing products).
I think MS will keep doing whatever it wants, disturbing healthy competition and progress. I think MS has been halting the progress of software in inconceivable ways for some time now (since 2002 or so). I think computer software would have been far more progressed than it is now, if we hadn’t Microsoft halting innovation all these years.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Victor, how can people be educated so as to seek and share knowledge using tools that give them exactly the opposite message: that knowledge has owners and they can and will control what you can see, do and learn using your computers?
May 18th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Feeling gladder and gladder that I bought an Eee PC (because I was too late to buy an XO). (Grumble)
May 21st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
The XO-1, as Mary Lou Jepson explained, transcended the “one miracle per product” paradigm. The problem with having so much “new” is that there is less connection with the current state-of-the-art. In my opinion, all there is to the Windows-OLPC connection is the resistance of adults (who control the purse strings) to purchasing machines that seem not to come with their familiar Microsoft “tools”. It is simply the same resistance to Linux machines that also exists in the personal computer world at large. Red Hat is to be commended for the wonderful work it did and is doing with OLPC. Sugar may be adapted to run on top of Windows, but I’d sooner think that once the machine is in the hands of a child, Windows won’t get much use.
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I think Robert Case is right about “the resistance of adults… to purchasing machines that seem not to come with their familiar Microsoft “tools””. One of the things that makes the OLPC (potentially) great is how it is designed for the education of children rather than for an industrial training program. It’s underlying vision is so much more than that. Just about any child can easily learn Windows & Office if they need to and they don’t need any of that to benefit from what the OLPC is, or at least was, intended to provide; i.e., a low-cost, flexible, resource light, network connected, one per child, computing tool. Requiring it to have Windows XP is like unto the old DOD requirement that any computer it purchased had to have a Cobol compiler (Yeah? The microprocessors in the cruise missiles, too?). It’s not needed and it increases the cost. The world won’t end if OLPC runs Windows, but it moves the OLPC away from its purpose to adapt it so.