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Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists
Journal written by fyoder (857358) and posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 28, 2008 11:15 AM
from the fundies-have-more-fun dept.
from the fundies-have-more-fun dept.
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."
Related Stories
[+]
Hardware: Negroponte Says Windows 'Runs Well' On XO Laptop 339 comments
Stony Stevenson alerts us to comments from OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte indicating his approval of Windows' performance on the XO laptop. Negroponte said in an email, "Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms and to run under Windows." The full email is available at OLPC News. He was also quoted by the Associated Press as saying that Sugar "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way," and cited the lack of Flash as an example. Negroponte continued, "There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community. One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."
[+]
Hardware: New President for OLPC Organization 251 comments
haroldag writes "After Walter Bender's resignation as president of OLPC, Charles Kane enters to take his place as the new boss. Kane says 'The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible. Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn't matter. It's about getting it into kids' hands. Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for.'"
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Education and Secrets don't Mix. (Score:3, Insightful)
The article asks:
This is the wrong question to ask, so it's not surprising that people are a little confused about the answer. This is part of the problem of Open/Free/Linux linguistic ambiguity but it's constantly feed on by people like OLPCNews, an organization run by Intel employees who are working on another project. Eventually, the question is answered:
It's a little easier to say that secrets and education don't mix. Sharing is good and that children should not be taught the lessons of non free software in an educational setting - that ideas are things to be owned for personal advantage over people kept ignorant by intention.
It's also easy to see that Microsoft and their friends at Intel want nothing more than to kill OLPC. They would like to see OLPC go the way of DRDOS, BeOS, OS/2, SCO Unix and so on and so forth. They have consistently derided the whole concept and stooped to dirty tricks to block sales and use. Evangelism is still war to them [boycottnovell.com]. Anything they can do to delay the project is good for them, so they will be ready to provide all sorts of help and direction about how to make XP run on the thing and promise to stop hurting the project but it will all be a lie. OLPC will be fine for them when it's One MicroSoft Laptop Per Child and Sugar is broken and forgotten.
We can further be sure that everyone at OLPC knows all of the above and that the whole issue is just so much FUD and nonsense. OLPC is too busy getting their device to kids to fool with this kind of BS.
Re:Education and Secrets don't Mix. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you read his posts closely, you'll see that most of them are nothing but buzzword-compliant but meaningless semantic soup packaged up with some links that almost always fail to support
Re:Bruce Perens Explains the Details. (Score:4, Informative)
It's working though, I suppose. Since you post at -1 for trolling, any immediate positive-sounding replies tend to garner attention. I guess that's really the reason why you insult everyone's intelligence this way, isn't it? Just hoping to see if you can muster up a few mod points to bring your account out of karma hell?
Well, once you're done you'll need to work on the Erris [slashdot.org] account as well. That's gonna be rough.
Parent
damn fundamentalists (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If your fundamentals include "Randomly hunting people for sport is wrong", it's hard to argue....unless you don't mind if you or the people you love are hunted for sport.
Similarly, if the whole point of the project is to:
1) Free the third world and developing world from dependency on the first world
2) Allow children to tinker with every part of the OS so that they can experiment and learn how OSes work so they can gain more than consumer skills.
3
Re: (Score:3)
I agree that everyone should have ideals, but I believe that the ultimate goal should be balance, not monoculture.
Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Why laptops and books aren't enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:Why laptops and books aren't enough (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they aren't. The very best path to take is to give the children a path to learn those things without teachers. This is not only the case in the third world. Certainly when I was a young person in a wealthy suburb of New York, no teacher available to me was able to spend very much time on the advanced technology that I was interested in. I had to self-teach. That's why the laptop goes home with them. In observation of children and OLPC it's been clear that there is a lot of child-led activity, both collaborative and independent.
I recently keynoted the Latinoware conference at the Itaipu Binational of Brazil and Paraguay. I stayed in Foz do Iguacu. The differentiation between rich and poor was very clear. It was heartening to see 2500 people from all over Latin America there taking classes on Free Software.
I've got to disagree with you on this. Most people view GPL only from the perspective of the party receiving the software. For the party producing the software, GPL keeps large companies from running away with it while BSD makes it essentially an unrestricted gift to those large companies. Dual-licensing provides an opportunity to charge those who don't want to play by the Open Source rules, and to support the Open Source development with that money. It is true that there are a lot of companies that dual-license and don't really run a convincing community development at all, they are abusing the process.
Bruce
Parent
Students are teachers. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see teachers in sufficient numbers being prepared to take advantage of open source. In Brazil (where I live), I see teachers that can barely teach their subject with a blackboard and white chalk.
What I see is cool and nice that kids have it, but it is miles away form Seymour Papert's dream. Or Alan Kay's dream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovG_k2b3AXU [youtube.com]
When I was in 5th grade, I was taught Logo. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. These kids have Squeak. Squeak has the potential to blow your mind, because Squeak is multimedia-ready (and cool projects like Scratch have been developed on top of it).
But it seems that it ammounts to having a cool little laptop that can network.
There's nothing intrinsic to it that demands open source OS. Unfortunately, because ideally one would want to be able to go very, very deep. The project seems to fall short in that respect.
What are these kids learning that will teach them that it is the human that makes the computer?
That, to me, is the true "technological transfer."
So, the way the project has been led has been self-defeating, IMHO.
The last point I would like to make is that the GPL license does not, and will not, empower people in India, Brazil, or any other developing nation. This was a big mistake. Only a liberal license like the BSD license can empower people, permiting them to compete in a hostile commercial environment, contributing to a common source but not naively exposing one self to bigger corporations that would crush their businesses (unless they want to play the hypocritical "dual-licensing" - an euphemism to proprietary licensing).
You assume that kids who have these laptops can ONLY use them in the context of a western style classroom where a teacher gives them instructions on what to learn and how.
Did you consider that there might be some students who for lack of a better word, are geniuses, who can teach the class themselves? And their friends?
If you give an intelligent person access to unlimited information, and combine it with free time, and tools such as this laptop, learning will happen.
Just like if you give a kid a TV, the kid can find ways to learn from that for good or bad, if you give a kid a laptop, the kid can learn how to write code, how computers work, how the internet works, and eventually they'll be able to get on the internet and learn how the world works through wikipedia or whatever else happens to be on the internet.
I don't think this would be as powerful under windows because first of all, no one knows what the windows source code is. If I were a kid and I wanted to learn how windows works, I couldn't look at the code to find out.
How can you claim something is built for educational purposes if it's closed source? That's the anti-thesis of what you are trying to do with the project.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you look at the link I provided? If you had, you'd see that, through this simple graphical programming (that the kids don't even really realize they're doing), they can learn things like math [squeakland.org]:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If Microsoft goes bankrupt, or even simply loses interest in this project, nobody has the background resources necessary to support it unless
Fortunately, that's not how it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a support volunteer for OLPC. I'm not officially affiliated with them, but I've been volunteering for them since last year.
You're misrepresenting the project. I am not accusing you of making disingenuous posts, but I suspect you're either underinformed or you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Yes, the XO-1 laptop is a wonderful e-book platform. However, you don't need most of the stuff it comes with on an e-book reader. For instance, you don't need a webcam to read a book. The fact is, textbooks are one small part of the ideas that constitute Sugar, which is based on constructivist [wikipedia.org] education practices.
I'm sure you've heard the "it's not a laptop project, it's an education project" quote a million times. Well, it's not an e-book project either. It's an education project, and reading isn't the only way kids learn. We're not talking about the sort of education we receive here in the States, where we listen to an orator and take notes. It's self-directed. The XO-1 is a learning and exploration platform.
As to Microsoft, I have been assured by higher-ups at OLPC that they're not going to devote any resources to porting Sugar to Windows, or Windows to the XO-1. They just don't have the resources; they're too busy deploying [radian.org] laptops [radian.org]. Negroponte's point is that if someone wants to get it done, OLPC shouldn't stand in their way, which is entirely different from "let's drop linux." He's made other comments in the past about how Firefox wouldn't have gained the marketshare it has if it weren't for Windows. Likewise, a Sugar that is platform-ambivalent would rapidly gain mindshare in the educational world.
Sugar is not OLPC. OLPC is not the XO-1. Microsoft doesn't control any of those three things, and I doubt they will. Hell, in current builds, Sugar doesn't even start without NetworkManager, which isn't exactly Windows-compatible software.
You're a luminary in the FOSS world, and a geek hero. I'm sure you know that. I hope you're also aware when you start forecasting things based on insufficient information, a lot of people just take your word for it. I suggest you contact OLPC with your concerns, so they can be suitably allayed.
Parent
Re:Fortunately, that's not how it is. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re:Fortunately, that's not how it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Fortunately, that's not how it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
The lure of zero-cost, but DRM-locked, proprietary textbooks.
It's my duty - and that of others who care about freedom - to tell such educational bodies that they're harming their own people, and why.
You think they're just going to be able to boot an installation system and run it? It takes just a little firmware tweak to make that system boot only signed binaries - and we won't have the signing key.
Bruce
Parent
Well, look at the timing with Negroponte. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I have to disagree with you that it's "well under way." There's this wiki [laptop.org]. If you look at the books listed there, there is almost nothing at all at the K-12 level. Virtually the entire list consists of college textbooks, and quite a few of them are not even freshman college texts, they're at the upper-division level.
Maybe we're talking about different time scales. I've been cataloguing free books at theassayer.org since 2000. During that time, the good news has been that hundreds of high-quality free
Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately the creepy characters are not just lurking in shadows. Around the OOXML process they were quite visible in stuffing the ballot box, subverting votes entirely, etc.
Yes, they haven't proposed DRM yet. When rumors of dual-boot on OLPC first came out, I predicted that Negroponte would get closer to Microsoft. He did. I also predicted that there would be DRM on the platform. It's not there yet, but it will be if OLPC continues on this path, and it will be Microsoft's DRM.
Bruce
Parent
Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that such a move would be absolutely in character and a natural move for a company with the motto "embrace, extend, and extinguish", why shouldn't we?
It's a fundamental instinctive rule of thumb that usually serves us well. The guy who stole from you all last week probably intends to do it again today.
Monopolists are not known for their spirit of freely giving. If you don't see the catch, that just means it is hidden. If it's hidden, it means they believe you'd find it unacceptable if you saw it up front.
The alternative is an OS that is known to work well on small platforms and has been given freely since it's creation. In what way is that not a safer choice?
Parent
Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree. I think widespread usage of Linux is significantly to Apple's advantage. Any market-share taken from Microsoft means less applications will be Windows or IE only. That makes people who are bound to certain applications more likely to feel able to switch. Also, while many
Parent
Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP (Score:4, Informative)
Well, you excuse Vista, I guess, as just going along with HDCP as an industry-wide effort against the consumer? Consider that Microsoft was an important part of the development of HDCP.
Bruce
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The kids don't know the issues at all. But someday those kids will grow up, and they will either be able to build a software infrastructure for their countries, that they control, using Open Source, so that they will not be dependent, or they will not know how and will have to go to a proprietary software company for what they can afford.
free as in freedom (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Negroponte used to be one of the "fundamentalists" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Negroponte used to be one of the "fundamentalis (Score:3, Funny)
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.
But it's funny as hell when said idealists have to make a conscious choice between their open-source principles and getting more computers in the hands of kids (by selling
Re:Negroponte used to be one of the "fundamentalis (Score:4, Insightful)
Surely you wouldn't rather than some poor kid in Africa had no medicine relative to a couple pounds of Heroin?
Parent
Re:Negroponte used to be one of the "fundamentalis (Score:5, Informative)
Bruce
Parent
More fundamentally than fundamentalism (Score:5, Insightful)
OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Who own's the computer? Who owns the information on it? Who benefits from the children using the computer?
In the case of Linux: The child.
In the case of Windows: Microsoft.
If this attitude kills the OLPC, then it needs to die.
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:5, Insightful)
It may not "matter," per se' but why is "freedom" worth fighting for? Why would people rather be free than in a gilded cage?
An OLPC running Windows is nothing more than an attempt to trap even more people in Microsoft's monopoly and drain money from the poor.
Parent
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't matter in the short term. But in the long term, the kid will grow up, and he's likely to find that the only OS he learned how to use isn't being offered to adults for free. Then the price difference between the two paths may become rather large relative to his income.
Parent
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't base such decisions on what a child feels is important; if we did, we'd be giving them $100 of candy instead of laptops.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a common misconception that having an "open mind" requires one to consider all possibilities to have equal validity.
Knowing what I know about Sugar, and about each operating system, I cannot identify any scenario in which XP would be a better fit for the OLPC project than Linux.
This is not to say the OLPC project does not have issues; it does, not the least of which is all the hardware built
Off track (Score:3, Interesting)
A question of good faith (Score:5, Insightful)
Nigeria, Please. (Score:3, Funny)
The Market: *yawn*
FOSS: *yawn*
MS: $$$ !
Slashdot: -1, Troll
Negroponte: Hey, look at me, I'm an attention whore!
If it were a purely technical choice... (Score:3, Insightful)
Heresy : Think of the children? (Score:4, Insightful)
But... if Microsoft ponies up a few buckazoids and delivers some value to OLPC such that it helps OLPC meets its goals, then, how is that bad for the kids getting the computers, all Windows cracks aside?
sacrilege? no. stupid? yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not even taking into account the fact that Microsoft would likely take advantage of any alliance with OLPC to destroy OLPC, like Intel tried, and like they have done with so many other business partners; Microsoft simply isn't a trustworthy business partner. Furthermore, it is reasonable and justifiable for volunteers to have the goal of exposing children to an alternative to the Microsoft Windows monopoly, rather than to further Microsoft's business interests; that's not "fundamentalism", it is long-term rational, economic self-interest. Few people would have volunteered if it had meant developing a free educational software platform for Windows.
So, Windows on the OLPC just doesn't make any sense, and Sugar on Windows also makes little sense. And an alliance with Microsoft doesn't make sense either. I certainly am not going to develop free software for some kind of get-them-hooked-early Windows educational platform. There are plenty of other projects that help children that I can volunteer for. Negroponte either needs to make a more convincing argument (good luck), or he can expect a mass exodus of volunteers; nobody is obligated to work for him or his vision.
Posting this with Sugar on Ubuntu... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and anyone who wants to run Sugar on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy can find the packages in the "universe" repository.
Sugar is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
do not be surprised if (Score:3, Insightful)
Could Sugar even run on Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me what some people want is the ability to run the standard Windows Apps, mostly MS Office, and to have the ability to do some training with MS development tools. I guess I can sort of see this from the perspective of a country that wants to be the next outsourcing mecca. I'm not sure if the OLPC hardware would be good for this.
Maybe they could just dualboot the thing? Then let MS do their best to provide the missing pieces. If they want to play, then let them pay
OLPC is a discovery tool; Windows not discoverable (Score:3, Insightful)
I submit that such a discovery tool which encourages exploration and discovery of the tool itself is vastly more useful than one which does not. It's what Guy Steele called "going meta". Windows is not a very discoverable operating system.
In order for OLPC to fulfil its original stated purpose -- a rather noble one -- it must be based on open source. Linux is a good choice but it could be FreeBSD or Darwin or Plan 9 underneath as long as the source is freely available.