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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."
Okay folks, grab your pitchforks and your torches, it's time to round up as many of these damn fundamentalists as possible. They are destroying our world, and need to be exterminated, leaving only us pure non-fundamentalists.
OLPC can go two ways: one of the two is enough of a threat to book publishers and Microsoft that there will be a lot of force waged against it. The other way is just good for world freedom and doesn't have nearly as much power on its side.
The purpose of OLPC is not to give third world kids a laptop. It's to give them books. You see, those third world countries don't have an annual budget of $100/student to buy kids textbooks. So, OLPC is an efficient means to deliver e-texts to those kids.
The Microsoft way to do this is to have pervasive DRM as part of the OLPC framework. Microsoft will partner with textbook publishers to make free or low-cost but time-locked and otherwise DRM-encumbered electronic versions of their textbooks available on OLPC. Thus, there will be less reason for the development of fully free e-Texts under licensing that permits redistribution and derivative works. This way, the markets of those textbook publishers in more developed countries won't be threatened by the presence of those free texts, and Microsoft won't be threatened by a large force of youth trained on Linux.
The Open Source way is to direct the efforts of academic communities toward the creation of fully free e-texts under licensing that permits redistribution and derivative works. This is already well under way. OLPC would run Sugar on top of Linux, and would not in general be a DRM platform. Open texts would become a main stream in education, as would Open Source software. This is obviously a threat to textbook publishers and Microsoft.
The good news is that OLPC is not the only possible platform, and we can keep working on this without them. The bad news is that OLPC has the mind-share, and that's going to be hard to fight, especially with Microsoft behind them.
Microsoft has just essentially killed OpenDocument. They have made it redundant as a standard and showed that people who lobby for its use lose their jobs for their efforts. They did whatever was necesssary to win, with much dirty fighting and no shame about it. The folks at ISO and national organizations didn't show any shame about the perversion of their process, either. Expect to see similar in this case.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Negroponte himself, until recently, viewed openness of every component as a key principle of the project, which is why offers from both Apple and Microsoft to provide a free-as-in-beer customized version of their respective flagship OS's as the primary OS for the project were rejected out of hand.
It should be unsurprising that a project that, from the top, embraced openness as a central precept has attracted lots of people for whom such openness is an important ideal, and who are quite disappointed when the leader of the project suddenly embraces a proprietary technology and suggests shifting effort to supporting that technology.
No good can come from the OLPC that run Windows or any other proprietary system.
There are many "pragmatists" who say that it doesn't matter what runs on the device. To those people I submit, you are mistaken.
Linux, or FreeBSD, or NetBSD, I don't really care, is free. Windows is not. If you give them a laptop for education with free software, you have given them a "gift."
If you give them an OLPC with Windows, you've waisted everybody's time and energy and simply acted as a Microsoft marketing shill. Trapping even more of the world in Microsoft's monopoly.
It is reprehensible.
800 years ago, Moses Maimonides enumerated the forms of charity, from best to least:
[Text from Wikipedia]
OLPC with Linux and other Open Source is #1 on Maimonides list. It not only gives them textbooks, it gives them a structure that they can use to control their nation's own destiny - the free software on the system that they can use to communicate, plan, write, etc., and it gives them control over that structure so that they have independence.
In contrast, giving them a Microsoft framework is giving them an addictive dependence. Not charity at all.
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.
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.