Mandriva CEO rants at Steve Ballmer

What a fool. The classmate only commercial advantage over OLPC is that it is  a "normal" (read
bloated and badly ruggerized) laptop you can run "normal" (read windows) education apps on.

Of course any country that buys classmates is going to put windows on them at the first
opportunity (read when the MS discount is steep enough). That's the whole point. That's how
the classmate primary partner (Intel) is marketing it.

What? Mandriva really though Intel invited them on board to build a competitive Linux
solution? And not 
a. provide a cheap software placeholder while customers negociate with MS,
b. provide matter for anti-OLPC articles in Linux press outlets close to Mandriva?

Fedora got on the OLPC because it's a genuine charity program (and I suspect Red Hat is not
treating it as a direct money-earner) where being cheaper (installation and maintenance wise)
counts a lot.

The classmate is a defensive commercial program — that's not the same thing at all. But I
guess dreaming itself as the Red Hat of classmate, with rich Intel not poor AMD as partner,
and even earning hard money in the process, was too powerful a lure for Mandriva executives to
resist.

You'd have though their previous disasters would have taught them to concentrate on being a
competitive Linux distro instead of building castles in sand.