Sam Varghese
Friday, 16 May 2008 08:35
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The news that Windows XP will be made available on the One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop is now official. When the project began, a move such as this would have been dismissed out of hand by any of those involved. What has changed to make the OLPC just another seller of Windows laptops?
You have got to hand it to Nicholas Negroponte when it comes to spin. One of the
reasons why Windows is being ported to the XO laptop which he is selling through the One Laptop Per Child project is, apparently, because it passes "a sort of virility test."
I guess then that it would be logical to assume that a laptop which cannot run Windows is for wimps. In this case, Linux wimps.
Read
this wonderful piece, written by CNET's Ina Fried. There can be no posturing after this - OLPC is a commercial project which is selling laptops to provide a living for its employees. Period.
Negroponte has also admitted that he used the open source community to get the project started.
Let me quote the man himself: "For us to launch the laptop, we had no choice but to use open source. We needed the community. We needed to get (in) there at the OS level to build devices and drivers...to make our point, to make the laptop."
And now? I guess we can toss the open source community out, the same way you do with an oily rag. We really don't need it anymore.
At least if Negroponte said that, one would have to give him some credit for being open about his project - finally. But, no, he still continues to play both sides. He has said he is not giving up on Linux. Glory be! Hallelujah!
Many talented people have wasted a lot of time on what is going to turn out as a shofront for Windows; Red Hat's developers could well have used all those hours of development to good use on other projects and people like Walter Bender, Mary-Lou Jepsen and Ivan Krstic who worked on the project out of a sense of idealism could have done good work elsewhere.
Krstic's
latest comments about the OLPC are worth a read; let me quote one sentence here: "And the most upsetting part of the Windows announcement is not that it
exposed the actual agendas of a number of project participants which
had nothing to do with learning, but that Nicholas' misdirection and
sleight of hand were allowed to stand."
At the end of it all, we have a shop selling Windows laptops. And, hold on, this is meant to be spreading education. Sure.
