OLPC and Microsoft

Probably not hard. Simple logic has successfully proved the validity of everything from
Leninist communism to Randite objectivism. You just start with premises which almost everybody
will agree to, but which do not capture the nuances.

The assumption is that children can learn more by using an open system, where the 
inner workings are not hidden.

It is not that children may learn reading, writing or basic math better on an open system. 
But once they did that, with an open system, they have much information about the 
workings of a computer, an operating system, and applications right there for them to 
discover. More information means more things one can learn. Also with an open system, 
they have the possibility to experiment and play around like children tend to do and like 
children tend to learn.

This is strictly about learning about computers, which is arguably not the main goal of 
the OLPC project. But this also could have the side effect of more development going on 
and thus more things to play around with for the children and thus more to learn. This is 
the part that's speculative.

The simple and obvious version of the argument is that you can't learn what's kept secret from
you, by definition.  There's more to openness than “not secret” (e.g. openness to
modification), so in principle something could be more open without being less secret, but in
the current case, the free software install is less secret and more learnable.

I could go on and say why I think “more learnable” will in fact translate to being “more
learnt” (as has been the case for me using free software compared to previous proprietary
operating systems), but I suspect that that isn't gowen's objection: I suspect that the
objection is that learning about the software on one's computer is not the most important type
of learning, and that learning about other things (chemistry, say) can benefit more from
having access to software running in most of the world's schools (advantages of scale) than by
being modifiable by the students and teachers using the software.

I can't conclusively argue either way.

Getting back to “the most important type of learning”, I think we can agree that cooperation
and helping oneself and one's friends are very important things to learn, and software one is
forbidden from sharing or improving will be less conducive to that than software that
encourages one to look at and improve (and that needs improving!).

A less important point is that schools even in rich countries are increasing turning towards
free software and Linux/Gnu for education (anyone disagree?), so the network effect argument
will tilt less towards Windows over time.