Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists 414
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
A question of good faith (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
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
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.
The hypocrisy is staggering... (Score:2, Insightful)
I find it amazing how people who were all "visualize world peace", "think of the children", "let's sing cumbaya", and "brotherhood of mankind" who became part of the OLPC community via the G1G1 program can turn on a dime and be so vitriolic, judgmental, intolerant, and cynical when people don't fall lock-step into their beliefs.
As long as one toes the party line about Linux being the only platform viable for educating children, then all is well. But dare to consider the possibility that a slimmed down XP might also be a viable option... you better duck. You're immediately branded as shill for Microsoft.
Sugar on the XO is slow and incomplete. There still is no viable power management. The stylus areas are still not functional. The "view source code" button is "under development. 10,000's of XO laptops have been deployed worldwide that are not completely functional. Without working hardware drivers for particular aspects of the XO, how can anyone be certain that those features will actually work when the drivers ARE available? Finding out about a hardware design defect at that point in time is a little too late.
And the whole, "but if we don't use an open source operating system then little Johnny won't be able to view and tinker with the virtual memory manager!" justification just masks their own personal agenda.
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.
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:2, Insightful)
You're not helping children at all if your just using them as pawns to promote your own ideals. In fact, I see no difference between your position and Microsoft's.
Attitudes like yours give the entire open source movement a bad name.
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Heresy : Think of the children? (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
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
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
do not be surprised if (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Education and Secrets don't Mix. (Score:1, Insightful)
No one should be allowed to post with more than one account, nevermind actually replying to yourself to make it seem like you have a loyal following. That's just lame.
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
Re:Heresy : Think of the children? (Score:1, Insightful)
The key problem with the current OLPC software is that Sugar is sluggish, is tricky to develop for, and some aspects of the system (e.g. the journal/datastore) are still being hashed out. Other systems, like Ubuntu, already exist and run fine on the laptop but are less suited to the target audience than Sugar. Negroponte is using the frustration with Sugar's long development to drive the project to "Sugar on Windows". But how long will that porting effort last, when Windows itself is already sluggish and battery-hungry on the XO? The children will end up simply with Windows on the laptop, no Sugar, with only as much porting effort and maintenance as necessary to crush the Linux option.
Which might not be so bad if Windows were in any way appropriate for the hardware, but it is not, and the effort required may mean that it will never be. For starters, MS has chosen Windows XP and Office to run on a machine with less than a gigabyte of storage and a small screen; Windows Mobile would almost certainly have been a better choice, but then they couldn't brag about the mountains of educational software already available for Windows -- never mind that most of those programs require either an optical drive or the rest of the XO's storage, even if the processor was up to the challenge.
The XO's screen is small but its resolution is huge -- Windows XP's default DPI will be inadequate. But many third-party Windows programs perform poorly with the increased 120 DPI interface -- and those two sizes are the only options available.
You can kiss the mesh networking goodbye -- it's new and likely too different from regular PCs to support in Windows. Instead, far-flung villages will need to simply install more wireless routers out to their outskirts... Or simply require the children to keep their laptops in the school as is likely done with Classmate PCs -- which rather defeats the purpose of having laptops or sunlight-readable displays.
And it's just as well that the laptops will be staying at the schools, because they'll be needing regular doses of antivirus updates and Microsoft patches. Unlike the Linux systems that are designed to be used in areas of sporadic or non-existent internet connectivity, the Windows systems will need regular inoculation against the same Windows-, Internet Explorer-, and Flash-based threats that plague the rest of the world. And to fix the occasional malware or botnet infestation, each country will need to employ an army of Microsoft Certified Professionals. They will also be needed on hand to reset the students' forgotten network passwords (the Linux machines are secure without requiring children to remember passwords). The countries will also need to pay more for fuel to run the schools' diesel generators; while the specially tuned Linux kernel can effectively suspend and resume the system between user interactions, it is unlikely that Windows can be tuned to do the same.
So, in various technical and logistic areas, the Windows solution is inferior and will cost more than the Linux solution, even ignoring the license cost. TCO indeed.
Re:damn fundamentalists (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) Be free from vendor lock-in traps that could force the project to raise the prices simply because the monopoly created by the project would put the project at the mercy of the single vendor.
4) Allow the laptop to be as low cost as possible....not limited to the hardware requirements of a specific vendor.
Then open source is the only answer that can solve all these issues. If you give up on even one of these issues, there's no difference between the OLPC project and the Classmates project and the project might as well close down since it provides no value other than a non-standard GUI which could be ported to any environment....including Classmates. If you want to be pragmatic, then OLPC must die since it's a pointless diversion of resources that is harming the developing and third world.
If you want to be idealistic and stick to your fundamentals, you have a chance to change the world.
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.
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.
Re:Education and Secrets don't Mix. (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 the point he's making (though no one actually bothers to check them, apparently). This tends to look impressive, and so usually he gets modded up.
He does make sense sometimes, normally in the context of a RIAA or Patriot Act article and things like that. But the rest of the time, when he's wearing his "free software advocate" T-shirt, he makes no sense whatsoever.
It's weird, that someone actually has a skill that lets them write things that look interesting but convey no meaningful information whatsoever. The only other two types of human being I can think of that manage to pull that off are politicians and religious fundamentalists.
Re:Why laptops and books aren't enough (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:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP (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.
Well, a guy "Big Mike" hung out in your neighborhood, and he'd had some brushes with the law and some convictions, and he had just done something pretty bad recently, would you treat each new situation he got himself involved in as "Let's just assume he's trying to do the right thing", or would you be wary?Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP (Score:3, Insightful)
Bruce