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Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists
fyoder writes "Within the world of One Laptop per Child, both the Negropontistas and the Benderites envision a future for Sugar where it runs on multiple platforms, but the latter don't want Windows (or closed source anything) as part of that future. OLPC's emphasis has always seemed to me to be on Sugar, with Linux simply being a smart technical choice for the underlying OS. Yet what is becoming more explicit with the resignation of Walter Bender is that for many involved in the project there was a strong element of Linux advocacy, such that Negroponte's flirtation with Microsoft is felt to be pure sacrilege."
So it really is about pushing an agenda, not helping children. Got it.
So it really is about pushing an agenda, not helping children.
It is absolutely about the agenda of helping children, it is just the philosophy of how that is best accomplished.
I don't believe, for one minute, that giving laptops running Windows to children will benefit them in the long run. Microsoft's purpose is to sell Windows licenses. That means extracting money from those who can't afford it.
It is better to give them Linux. It may even be better to *not* give them computers if the choice is Windows, as the alternatives may be cheaper.
...which begs the question: Why not just fork Sugar and get it to run on an ubuntu-minimal install (with some tweaks, obviously)? Has Mark Shuttleworth weighed in on the OLPC situation yet? Maybe he would get behind some low-cost PCs running Ubuntu/Sugar.
Oh, and anyone who wants to run Sugar on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy can find the packages in the "universe" repository.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Well, I wish I could believe that it will go the way you say. With folks quitting over philosophical differences, I suspect there is some internal struggle over these ideas that you may not be party to. I'd be happy to meet with the current OLPC staff (do I just send Negroponte an email?) and hear their side.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Sugar is a blatant reinvention of the wheel, with the motivation being to evangelize a particular type of interface.
A well designed os is invisible to and unnoticed by the user. I think the same thing is true for a window manager (which is what sugar boils down to at the end of the day). They should just pick a simple X implementation that meets their requirements, pick a simple window manager _that is actually being used daily by people in the real world_ and move on to the applications and content, which is what really matters.
With sugar they're falling into the windows trap of "the users are idiots, let's bend over backwards to dumb down the interface." I think smart kids are going to be pissed when they realize no one in developed countries uses sugar, and they see how fast their system can run without sugar. The smart kids are really the ones olpc should be targeting, because they are the ones that will grow up to make a difference in these countries.
Trust me, the OLPC support gang has been following the plot. It's important to remember that Negroponte is a visionary -- not just as a label meaning "he comes up with Big Ideas," either. He just looks at everything that way, with a long-term worldview and a high-altitude perspective. It leads to scuffles like this between the head-shed and his field commanders, if that makes sense. Plenty of people send him e-mail, and even us "little guys" get responses. Another great person there is their Technology Manager, Kim Quirk [kim at laptop dot o r g]. I also don't understand your "Microsoft gamed the ISO for OOXML, therefore OLPC is next" rhetoric. The ISO is a flawed quasi-democratic construct, and Microsoft beat them with money. OLPC is a corporate, not-for-profit entity. Are you suggesting they'll be paid to port Windows to the XO-1? Somehow that Sugar will be suddenly close-sourced? The whole point of the GPL and licenses like it is to prevent exactly what you're describing. Even if Microsoft produces a DRM-encumbered operating system for the XO-1, what makes you think a country will choose it over the freely-available Sugar-on-Fedora that the XO currently runs? Furthermore, and more to the point, if an educational body does choose a closed MS platform over a FOSS platform, isn't that their right? If they don't make such mistakes, how will they learn? :) And when the DRM becomes unbearable, Sugar will still be there, still running on Fedora -- and an easy migration destination, if they've spent a year or so running Sugar on Windows.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Here's how I see it from the perspective of a person in Taiwan with some familiarity with the OEM industry which makes practically all notebooks in the world including the OLPC.
A lot of people outside of Taiwan don't really grasp what the whole OEM/ODM industrial ecosystem is about. OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer which is a vague title. What it really means is that there are these vast manufacturing plants owned by companies with names mostly unknown in the West that take design specifications from brands like Apple, HP, Compaq etc. and actually make the products in massive swaths of like a minimum of ten thousand units.
Now these OEMs profit by working on massive scales and have relatively thin margins. In order to profit, they have this basic minimum order number and they can't afford to negotiate below a certain unit number of say ten thousand units.
By the same token, this minimum order requirement means that there can only be so many players in market because there's only so much capacity and the granularity of the minimum order is set really high so there is something of a zero sum game in this. There is always room for future expansion of sales stay high for prolonged periods, but quarter to quarter things are pretty fixed.
Now, last year something big happened that had never happened before and that was the OLPC got enough orders that they were able to tie up a manufacturing unit of one of these OEMs. Again, this is a big deal because you can't just magically create more all of a sudden --there's a set amount. And what that meant was for the first time there was all this manufacturing in the notebook market that was being taken out of the windows market and being dedicated to the open source. Now there can be little doubt that MS had assumed for so many years that this market was their property.
To make matters worse, it was only a few months later when Asus hit the market with the EeePc and soon a whole flood of these little fuckers who weren't paying the tax were springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.
No doubt this was a huge concern in Redmond. Then CNet attacked Vista and things were just seeming to go to shit and suddenly out of the blue --now come on, is it really out of the blue-- Negroponte announces that XP is probably just as good as Linux for the OLPC.
I don't think there's a big coincidence here.