Tuesday, August 05, 2008
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OLPC's a con - former insider

From The Register


Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation have confirmed that the XO laptop will soon be available as Windows-loaded machines.
They will be sold in five or six countries (Microsoft hasn’t said which ones) starting in June, with a broader release penciled in for August or September this year.
The announcement follows last month’s email from the OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte. He said at the time that the group had reached an agreement with the software giant to adapt the distinctive green and white XO laptop to run the Windows operating system.
The XO laptops, which come with a $188 price tag, have been designed to save the children of developing countries from a world without technology, although take up has so far been somewhat sluggish.
“We still have no plans to make Windows available for individuals who bought an XO in the Give 1 Get 1 program though.”
In May Redmond and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation confirmed the XO laptop would be made available as Windows-loaded machines. That was Microsoft’s first public acknowledgement that the firm was working on a port of XP for the distinctive white and green machine.
That followed OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte revealing in April that the group had reached a Windows-only agreement with the software giant, much to the chagrin of Linux fanciers.
Earlier this year Negroponte had called for the development of a dual-boot XO laptop with both Linux and Windows to give the world's poorest school kids the widest range of choice. However, under the Microsoft deal, it was agreed that an initial, limited run of $188-priced XOs will ship as Windows-only machines.



OLPC's a con - former insider
The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It's all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.
"I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward," writes Krstić.
"Nicholas' new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn't work."
Negroponte's decision to embrace Windows has seen top-level resignations from the OLPC project. CTO Mary Lou Jepsen left in January, and former software chief and president Walter Bender departed in April. Krstić resigned in March.
OLPC is a poster child for free software innovation, with critics acknowledging value in its advances in mesh networking and the radical task-based UI Sugar. But the F/OSS ideals are now being jetissoned, writes Krstić, along with the crown jewels:
"In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He's told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its 'availability' as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster."
Not everyone thinks Sugar is a successful UI - judge for yourself in our extensive hands-on.



OLPC sweet talks Microsoft Sprinkles Sugar on top of Windows Published Thursday 24th April 2008
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) is adapting its Sugar software package to make it compatible with Microsoft’s operating system.
The group’s founder Nicholas Negroponte said in an email yesterday that it was agreed after months of discussions with the software giant that the XO Laptop, which currently only runs on a Red Hat-developed version of Linux, should be adapted to run Windows.
Explaining the rationale behind the decision, Negroponte said: “Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms and run under Windows.”
He said that Microsoft and the Foundation are also exploring the possibility of a dual boot version of the XO with the option to run Linux or Windows.
Negroponte also went to some pains in his email to insist that the non-profit group’s decision to climb into bed with Microsoft does not mean that the group would abandon open source software development.
“Sugar is a very good idea, less than perfectly executed," he said. "I attribute our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices. Our mission has never changed. It has been to bring connected laptops for learning to children in the poorest and most remote locations of the world.”
“Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning model or pure open source. I believe the best educational tool is constructionism and the best software development method is open source.”
The OLPC Foundation started manufacturing the $188 XO laptop, which is designed to save the children of developing countries from a world without technology, late last year.
Earlier this week, the OLPC Foundation lost a key person behind the XO laptop scheme, which reached fewer school kids than the group originally hoped because of reluctance among governments to invest in a non-Windows machine.
According to AP Walter Bender, who is a big open source fan, left the project just at the moment when the organisation opened its arms to Windows.
His resignation was the OLPC's third high-profile casualty inside a few months. Since December its chief technology officer Mary Lou Jepsen and top security architect Ivan Krstic have also left the group.
Bender now has plans to launch an independent effort to further develop Sugar by getting it run to computers other than XOs. He said in an email: "Sugar is in a narrow place and it is ripe to be unleashed."

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Additional Reading

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Nov. 14th 2005 "Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company's operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders. "We declined because it's not open source," says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment." <http://tinyurl.com/e227w> <http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113193305149696140-442o71jo_IlBrLpyUeeOdsqDs7E_20061113.html>

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May 16th, 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8846
XP meets XO: Will Linux get an equal shot?

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May 15, 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1402

Microsoft and the OLPC announced they were going to deliver Windows on XO machines, which previously were slated to run Linux only. That announcement led to complaints by Linux backers and resignations of some OLPC officials.

The “purity” issue is a complex one. Ivan Krstic, Former Director of Security Architecture for OLPC (who resigned in March of this year), has an interesting post on the tensions between Windows and Linux in the OLPC arena. An excerpt from his May 13 post that caught my eye:
“OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor. It should not believe the nonsense about Windows being a requirement for business after the children grow up. Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business. And OLPC shouldn’t make its sole OS one that cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project’s laptops apart: released versions of Windows can neither make good use of the XO power management, nor its full mesh or advanced display capabilities.”

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May 13, 2008
http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi

The “purity” issue is a complex one. Ivan Krstic, Former Director of Security Architecture for OLPC (who resigned in March of this year), has an interesting post on the tensions between Windows and Linux in the OLPC arena. An excerpt from his May 13 post that caught my eye:

“OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor. It should not believe the nonsense about Windows being a requirement for business after the children grow up. Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business. And OLPC shouldn’t make its sole OS one that cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project’s laptops apart: released versions of Windows can neither make good use of the XO power management, nor its full mesh or advanced display capabilities.”
Most importantly, the OS that OLPC ships should be one that embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to. The culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, of freely doing and debugging — this is important. OLPC has a responsibility to spread the culture of freedom and ideas that support its educational mission; that cannot be done by only offering a proprietary operating system for the laptops.

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July 25, 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1504
As James Utzschneider, General Manager of Marketing and Communications for the Unlimited Potential Group, announced on his blog on July 24:
“Windows on the XO looks like it is on track for availability in these types of national educational PC deals in September. We still have no plans to make Windows available for individuals who bought an XO in the Give 1 Get 1 program though.”
karen
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