Colombia Signs Up For OLPC Laptops With Windows

Reader Cowards Anonymous writes with this excerpt from Good Gear Guide: "Colombia will become the second country to use the One Laptop Per Child Project's (OLPC) XO laptops running Microsoft Windows XP in schools after signing an agreement for pilot programs in two towns. Schools in the towns of Quetame and Chia will be outfitted with the small green XO laptops developed by the OLPC. The pilot programs are expected to expand over time."

Comments

failure for Sugar, not for Linux?

[Mr. Slippery]

I have to wonder what role Sugar plays in the decision to go with XP.

You get one choice that looks like a computer, windows and menus and the like; and you get one choice that looks like nothing you've ever seen, that doesn't give kids experience with a typical computer internface and is based on unproven ideas about how children learn.

OLPC w/ XFCE FTW.

Re:failure for Sugar, not for Linux?

[pizzach]

This may sound a bit wierd, but I wish that my first computer was a commodore 64. I think it would have been a much more educational experience than Win 3.1 on a mulitimedia PC. Meh. Shoulda woulda coulda.

Re:failure for Sugar, not for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

My first computer WAS a Commodore 64. Actually it was a Commodore Vic 20 and I later UPGRADED to the 64. Yes, I am that old...

Did I learn MORE than someone using Win 3.1? No. I learned different stuff. I did learn about PEEKs and POKEs and an oddball OS running on very, very limited hardware. I learned to be patient while Crush, Crumble and Chomp spent 30 minutes loading from cassette tape (50% of the time it would fail too, plus when you die you had to RELOAD the game, good times). You could have learned fairly equivalent stuff on Windows. Keep in mind the Commodores were NOT open source operating systems.

For someone who cares about how computers work, open source software is great. However, the vast majority of people on the planet have very, very little interest in knowing how computers work. They don't care how their TV works or car either. They have things they want to do with those tools, not spend time tinkering with those tools.

That does NOT make them bad people either. If you think it does, you should really get out more and meet a more diverse group of people. If you like tinkering with the system, great! Enjoy it!

If I don't stop now I am going to drop into a very long rambling reminiscence of the good, bad and ugly of working with Commodores. Ah, you never forget your first love...

Re:...and the slavery begins.

[icepick72]

Nevermind that it's second-rate and vastly inferior to Linux in more aspects than I care to count.
Unless you look at the aspects where Linux is inferior to Windows.

They'll all be dependent on us!
How did Microsoft becomes "us"? ... assuming you mean the Windows OS on the XO laptops. Microsoft is based in the US but the company exists around the world so finding support shouldn't be hard from any country. You're too Microsoft focused. Your perceived entrapment case is larger than you think if you broaden your scope beyond only the OS: OLPC is funded by member organizations, including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat.[2][3] Each company has donated two million dollars. While OLPC is 'not for profit', the XO-1 manufacturers including many members are expected to receive 5-10% profit from sales of the unit. Companies are profiting fiscally and Microsoft isn't mentioned...

crippling developing nations with Windows, future generations are gonna hate us more than you can ever imagine...
Nothing is being forced on them. It's the developing country's choice what to deploy. There's no reason for "them" to hate "us" over their decision about these laptops.

Dammit the incessant arguing gets tiring. Ultimately these countries are getting set up with hardware and software. Learning can be achieved on any of these platforms. Many techies are putting their OS arguments as priority over real people in developing nations. This is why things slow down. But this is tech news, and maybe we shouldn't expect to find many altruistic nerds.

Re:hmmm.

[rolfwind]

The vast majority of users, in fact, do not pay these fees on anything but an irregular basis, and the fees they do pay, which are rolled into OEM machines, are so low when spread across the time involved that Microsoft's 'raping license fees' work out for your average user somewhere between $20-$30 per year, I would imagine.

Why, as a consumer, can I not buy Windows for a similiar low price, or a low multiple? Why is it in the hundreds of $$$? Why are there over 6 versions of Vista now? Why not just 2?

Possibly. I'm not necessarily convinced that free and open access to information is necessary... or even useful.

Don't use wikipedia then. I use it about 50 times a day. I just contributed $100 toward it because it's that usefull to me. No static, "closed-soure" encyclopedia comes close for me for 'esoteric' topics.

Re:hmmm.

[Atlantis-Rising]

It's not just about the Microsoft tax but the fact that Microsoft conspires against you in order to make it nearly impossible to use anything else. It doesn't matter what your requirements. It doesn't matter how poorly Microsoft's product meeds those requirements. If they get their way, you will be forced to use their crap whether you want to or not.

Firstly, it's linguistically incorrect to call it a tax. A tax, by definition, is a charge imposed by a government.

However, that point aside, your argument is not new. All organized economic systems will gravitate toward monopoly and all systems, period, will gravitate toward homogeneity without an external guiding force. The advantages, in both cases, are simply too large to ignore.

This is especially true in software. It's not even that Microsft has to conspire against you. Compatibility is simply so important, and the easiest way to be compatible is for everyone to have the same thing. There is enormous impetus for everyone to adopt the market leader in software in order to maintain that same compatibility.

Now, whether or not Microsoft is purposefully stopping their opponents from being compatible, they probably are, although I think it's nowhere near as bad as some people claim. Microsoft is a large, almost monolithic entity, and it is very slow to adapt. Given the speed at which other organizations can, and have in the past adapted, I think there are many other forces in play preventing ultimate compatibility with Microsoft systems, some of which are more significant, than Microsoft's obstinate 'conspiracy'.

The only thing that's keeping them at bay is Free Software.

It even helps keep the world safe for the one remaining real
competitor to Microsoft left: namely Apple.

Can we please keep the nutcase conspiracy wanking down to a dull roar?

It's more than just the cost of Windows. It's also the cost of
all of the overhead of dealing with Windows crap and remaining
"compatible" with whatever sort of app Microsoft might have
dominance in today.

This argument applies to anything... for example, healthcare service provisioning. And yet the argument is ultimately uncompelling. If you compare universal healthcare to market-based health care, in almost every metric universal health care in the western world comes out better overall, despite being, almost by nature, a monopoly at one level or another.

There are, indeed, overhead costs that arise. But these costs, in many cases, are not sufficient to outweigh the simple gains of homogeneity that arises through monopoly.

How Open Source benefits consumers

[SethJohnson]

I hate getting into internet arguments, and I'm only replying to this comment because Atlantis seems like a thoughtful person who has presented a reasoned, but off-mark perspective here.

Open Source has really never been terribly important for your average person; all of its important freedoms relate to developers.

The freedoms that Open Source brings to developers directly impacts users. Support for hardware and software provided by corporations can only last as long as there is a commercial interest in people using a given product. Old peripherals don't get drivers coded by their vendor for new OS releases and new peripherals don't get drivers bundled for old OS installations. Open source has thankfully picked up the slack for these users. Microsoft intentionally is withholding additional development on fixes, updates, etc. on this end-of-lifed OS, pressuring users to purchase an upgrade to its replacement OS. As new protocols, file formats, and other technical evolutions come along, XP will not be updated to support them.

With the OLPC program, WinXP laptop recipients are being shackled to limited future use of their gifted laptop. The Sugar laptop recipients have a multitude of developers committed to continuing the relevance of their platform for many years to come.

Please don't take this as a Microsoft-bashing rant. Substitute the name 'Microsoft' with any closed-source vendor. Microsoft is just the convenient example in this discussion. Take Internet Explorer. Once Netscape collapsed, there was no commercial incentive for Microsoft to improve its browser. (Yes, I know this is heading into the economics of competition-- I'll return to the original point of Open Source benefiting the user.) Since MS dominated the product category, they could withdraw those development resources to focus on other areas of generating profit. Internet Explorer withered for years because there was no pressure to add features or increase it's performance. The cost of developing a new, competing browser from scratch eliminated any possible threats from other commercial software vendors, too. That is, if they weren't given a community-developed code base for free. Eventually, Internet Explorer became embarrassingly antiquated, lacking modern features such as tabbed browsing because open source projects brought innovations to this product category which motivated Microsoft to restart IE development.

I could go on with many more examples of open source benefiting consumers, but I pity this dead horse I'm beating.

Seth