Not over-reacting

Not over-reacting

Posted Jan 10, 2008 21:26 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
In reply to: perhaps an overreaction? by stevenj
Parent article: Why Microsoft Must Control One Laptop Per Child (Technocrat.net)

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

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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