Peru To Be First To Put Windows On OLPC Laptop

Da Massive writes "The government of Peru will run the first ever trial of the One Laptop Per Child association's XO laptop running Windows XP. This puts the nation at the heart of a software controversy that has been raging for years between those who advocate making software and its source code free, such as Linux OS developers, and those who charge for software and keep the development recipes secret, such as Microsoft."

Comments

Re:pilot project of Microsoft, not Peru

[teazen]

What also needs clarifying perhaps is that it's not OLPC that's abandoning Linux for Windows. OLPC is basically becoming more and more a hardware vendor. It's not OLPC that does the deployments and it's not OLPC that decides what software will be shipped with the cute green thingies. That would be the governments and grassroots organizations that buy said laptops.

Here in Nepal, where our grassroots organization has started a pilot project, there's as of yet not all to much help from OLPC, except from IRC and mailing-list traffic. Also Sugar for example is now handled by an independent organization called Sugarlabs, even though the developers of OLPC and Sugarlabs still work together.

So there's at least three parties, but usually the playing field is quite a bit more complicated in a deployment zone (rivalling hardware vendors, the relationship between grassroots organizations and governments, elections, etc...), and all players can mix and match with others. We for example can run our educational software on a classmate if we want or need to. And Sugar is on the way to be ported to other platforms. Windows can run on the XO...

Also the headlines about the XO lately make it seem like Windows has already won the race. But the reality atm is that there are 55k Linux/Sugar XO's are being shipped every month and a stable, workable Windows on the XO is still a few months away. Also the new round of Give One Get One will contain Linux, not Windows. And I have yet to hear of a confirmed large scale XO deployment with Windows on in stead of Linux.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Bert64]

The difference is...
The C64, VIC20, PET etc all dropped you into a BASIC interpreter and encouraged you to learn how do do more than just play prewritten games.
Windows actively discourages you from doing this, even trying to view a list of system files is greeted with a "this is dangerous, dont do this" warning.

Commodore were very good in that respect, even the later Amiga systems came with simply instructions to copy the workbench disks, and then declared you can do anything you like to the copy and encouraged you to do so, worst case you simply go back to the start and make a new copy of the originals.