perhaps an overreaction? [LWN.net]

perhaps an overreaction?

Posted Jan 10, 2008 19:42 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421)
Parent article: Why Microsoft Must Control One Laptop Per Child (Technocrat.net)

Bruce wrote:

Consider how good it might have been for the third world to have a computer infrasturcture they could support on their own, without any capital and technological drain to the United States. That's what they'll be losing. But that was never the goal of the OLPC project. It's meant to bring free e-Books to students, at a lower cost than their national governments could sustain. With OLPC based on all Free Software, it was likely that those books would have themselves been under similar licensing like Creative Content. Now, it is likely that third world students will be running DRM-locked textbooks that are only acessable under Windows.

From the OLPC faq:

The laptop will run a Microsoft Windows operating system
True: Microsoft is working on a Windows based system that can be executed on the XO laptop with substantial extra storage.
False: There is no strategy change. The OLPC is continuing to develop a Linux-based software set for the laptop in conjunction with Red Hat. But since the OLPC project is open we cannot (and maybe even don't want to) stop other people from developing and supplying alternate software packages.

My guess is that Microsoft gave OLPC a heap of money, with no strings attached (Negroponte isn't an idiot) and for minimal effort on the part of the OLPC project, to participate in making a dual-boot prototype. Mainly, the onus seems to be on MS to get Windows to run with adequate performance on the OLPC hardware.

As they say, it's open hardware; they couldn't stop MS from porting Windows to it if they tried (except by making the specs too underpowered for Windows to be practical, which they've already done with the unmodified initial hardware...but in the long term the hardware was bound to get more powerful along with the rest of the computer industry).

There was always going to be competition from MS for OLPC; hopefully, the innovative software, the lower cost sans Windows, and the free/libre aspect of it will be sufficient to persuade countries to adopt it.

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Not over-reacting

Posted Jan 10, 2008 21:26 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

But Negroponte doesn't have to change policy. All that is necessary is for MS to convince the countries that buy OLPC that they should be running a Microsoft load upon it. One good way to do this is for MS to cooperate with existing proprietary publishers to make free textbooks available to those countries, but with Microsoft DRM locks. This would also help to dissuade the production of open text, which those publishers see as a threat.

I've watched MS for a long time, and have had to be in the same room with them at political proceedings, standards committee meetings, etc. I thus have some idea how they work and their path with OLPC seems obvious to me.

Thanks

Bruce

Not over-reacting

Posted Jan 17, 2008 12:50 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

This is very much the Microsoft approach, as
experienced by us back in the days of 
wholly-proprietary email systems.  Make
sure yours can be used, then make
side deals to impose it.

--dave