OLPC Orwellian defection to Windows

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 30 October 2007 10:22

Opinion and Analysis

When I think of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project these days I'm reminded of George Orwell's two most famous books - 1984, which coined the term Doublethink, and Animal Farm, which saw the Pigs betray their fellow animals and do business with humans.

Looking back over the past year, one could be excused for wondering whether OLPC studied Orwellian marketing methods. While laptop computers from mainstream vendors the world over have been dropping in price, the so-called US$100 XO laptop has jumped to $150, then $188 before finally going on sale for $200 - and you have to buy 10,000 of them to get that price!

Now of course there should be no objection to OLPC using Intel processors in the XO, even though OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte publicly made a song and dance about the organization's partnership with AMD and earlier this year slammed Intel for competing with the XO by allegedly dumping its own $250 Windows XP laptop, the Classmate, on markets at below cost.

Today, however, all of that is behind us. Intel and and OLPC are the best of friends and, while we all know there are no friends in business, one wonders what AMD must be thinking of its formerly exclusive partner.

Last week we heard the news about how Microsoft is devoting non-trivial resources to developing of version of Windows for the XO. Today, on Cnet , we hear from Negroponte that OLPC not only endorses Microsoft's efforts, it has been actively collaborating with Microsoft all along!

In fact, if I understand Negroponte correctly, OLPC even included a special memory expansion slot on the XO specifically to make it possible to add more memory so the XO would be capable of running Windows. Were we talking about keeping costs of the XO down or did I miss something?

According to the Cnet report, Negroponte's reasoning is that OLPC project is supposed to be an open source project and therefore it can't be closed to Microsoft. Well fine, does that mean whatever Microsoft contributes to the project will also be open? Will the version of Windows that runs on the XO be open source? I think we all know the answer to that one.

What we had when we started was $100 laptop for third world children using AMD chips running Linux and open source software. What we have now is a $200 laptop that uses Intel chips, can only be bought in minimum bundles of 10,000, and includes a memory expansion slot in order to run Windows.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." (Animal Farm, Orwell, 1945).