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."
Off track (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way (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)
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.
Linux / Sugar implementation (Score:2, Interesting)
But there are annoyances beyond it being sluggish (which is perhaps to be expected with the low-end hardware)
The mouse goes random every now and again. The XO does not turn off reliably. Drawings get "out of control" as you draw a rectangle and it seems to go in any direction except where you want to put it. The paradigm of fetching a picture from the journal to paste into a document is just too time consuming. WiFi to a gateway has "issues".
It seems to me that if OLPC could make what's there work well, then a lot of issues about MS vs Linux would dry up.
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.
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
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.
Re:Fortunately, that's not how it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Dose of reality (Score:1, Interesting)
There is a lot of fear and uncertainty around constructivist learning
So when a government official decides to buy OLPC it's because they think it will improve the use of the textbook spending budget.
This is why the situation that Bruce outlined is such a threat... because a highly propritary DRMed ebook mostly OLPC would quite likely be a better fit for the short term textbook replacement goals. Yet the resulting compromise of the public's freedom would be a harm of enormous size.
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
Re:Why laptops and books aren't enough (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 Microsoft completely open sourced it first.
Re:The hypocrisy is staggering... (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 into the XO-1 for which there is not yet any software support. I ask you, then: how will migrating to Windows fix any of those issues? What is the disease for which a convoluted, proprietary closed-source operating system is a viable cure?
Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP (Score:3, Interesting)
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 books have appeared. The bad news is that essentially none of those are K-12 books. If the deficit of free K-12 is going to start changing, I'd expect that the time scale for that to happen would have to be at least a decade. And a decade would, IMO, be an optimistic figure that would occur only if something fundamental changed that would get people started on writing those K-12 books. In fact, I don't see that kind of fundamental change happening. I think there are probably two reasons why free K-12 books have never gotten off the ground. (1) People writing free books are generally affluent people in the U.S., who can afford to do it as a hobby. Some are computer programmers writing documentation for software, and others are university professors. None of them are K-12 teachers, probably because K-12 teachers have all they can handle just managing a classroom full of 35 kids. (2) In most places in the U.S., textbook buying decisions are heavily bureacratized. Book publishers spend vast amounts of money on marketing and lobbying. My own free physics books are college-level books, but sometimes high schools do use them; I think it's telling that nearly all the high schools using them are private schools.
If "well under way" means "likely to get going within our lifetimes," then I'd say maybe. But I certainly don't see any sign that it's going to happen during the lifetime of OLPC.
Re:Fortunately, that's not how it is. (Score:2, Interesting)