Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists

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."

damn fundamentalists

Okay folks, grab your pitchforks and your torches, it's time to round up as many of these damn fundamentalists as possible. They are destroying our world, and need to be exterminated, leaving only us pure non-fundamentalists.

Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLPC

I predicted this [technocrat.net] a while ago when they were just talking about "dual boot".

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

Why should it matter to some poor kid, just needing a way to afford schoolbooks, what OS his laptop is running?

800 years ago, Moses Maimonides enumerated the forms of charity, from best to least:

1. 1. Giving a pauper independence so that he will not have to depend on charity. Maimonides enumerates four forms of this, from the greatest to the weakest:
2. 1. a. Giving a poor person work.
   2. b. Making a partnership with him or her (this is lower than work, as the recipient might feel he doesn't put enough into the partnership).
   3. c. Giving a loan.
   4. d. Giving a gift.
3. 2. Giving charity anonymously to an unknown recipient.
4. 3. Giving charity anonymously to a known recipient.
5. 4. Giving charity publicly to an unknown recipient.
6. 5. Giving charity before being asked.
7. 6. Giving adequately after being asked.
8. 7. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
9. 8. Giving unwillingly.

[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:Why laptops and books aren't enough

I don't see teachers in sufficient numbers being prepared to take advantage of open source.

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.

the GPL license does not, and will not, empower people

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

Fortunately, that's not how it is.

Hi Bruce,

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:Fortunately, that's not how it is.

Hi Karmaflux,

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

Re:Fortunately, that's not how it is.

Trust me, the OLPC support gang has been following the plot. It's important to remember that Negroponte is a visionary -- not just as a label meaning "he comes up with Big Ideas," either. He just looks at everything that way, with a long-term worldview and a high-altitude perspective. It leads to scuffles like this between the head-shed and his field commanders, if that makes sense. Plenty of people send him e-mail, and even us "little guys" get responses. Another great person there is their Technology Manager, Kim Quirk [kim at laptop dot o r g]. I also don't understand your "Microsoft gamed the ISO for OOXML, therefore OLPC is next" rhetoric. The ISO is a flawed quasi-democratic construct, and Microsoft beat them with money. OLPC is a corporate, not-for-profit entity. Are you suggesting they'll be paid to port Windows to the XO-1? Somehow that Sugar will be suddenly close-sourced? The whole point of the GPL and licenses like it is to prevent exactly what you're describing. Even if Microsoft produces a DRM-encumbered operating system for the XO-1, what makes you think a country will choose it over the freely-available Sugar-on-Fedora that the XO currently runs? Furthermore, and more to the point, if an educational body does choose a closed MS platform over a FOSS platform, isn't that their right? If they don't make such mistakes, how will they learn? :) And when the DRM becomes unbearable, Sugar will still be there, still running on Fedora -- and an easy migration destination, if they've spent a year or so running Sugar on Windows.

Re:Fortunately, that's not how it is.

Even if Microsoft produces a DRM-encumbered operating system for the XO-1, what makes you think a country will choose it over the freely-available Sugar-on-Fedora that the XO currently runs?

The lure of zero-cost, but DRM-locked, proprietary textbooks.

if an educational body does choose a closed MS platform over a FOSS platform, isn't that their right? If

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.

And when the DRM becomes unbearable, Sugar will still be there, still running on Fedora -- and an easy migration destination, if they've spent a year or so running Sugar on Windows.

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

Well, look at the timing with Negroponte.

Here's how I see it from the perspective of a person in Taiwan with some familiarity with the OEM industry which makes practically all notebooks in the world including the OLPC.

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.
     

Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP

Every time Microsoft is involved people start seeing creepy characters lurking in the shadows.

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

Re:Why MS and textbook publishers must control OLP

Microsoft's behavior has been DRM agnostic much of the time.

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

Negroponte used to be one of the "fundamentalists"

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.

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

He's making the point that some medicine might stop the pain, for now, while addicting you for life - for the sake of assuring the drug pusher a good income. A lot of us see the Microsoft platform as a means for those kids to read textbooks that also closes them out from broader options (like learning how to self-govern their nation's IT infrastructure) and creates a lifelong addiction for their nation on Microsoft software.

Bruce

More fundamentally than fundamentalism

To hell with ideology. Two completely different user environments, one running on top of another and ultimately requiring someone at some level to be an expert in both, is bad design and asking for trouble.

OLPC Has Lost Its Way

No good can come from the OLPC that run Windows or any other proprietary system.

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:OLPC Has Lost Its Way

So it really is about pushing an agenda, not helping children. Got it.

Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way

So it really is about pushing an agenda, not helping children.

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.

Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way

Why should it matter to some poor kid, just needing a way to afford schoolbooks, what OS his laptop is running?

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.

Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way

Why should it matter to some poor kid, just needing a way to afford schoolbooks, what OS his laptop is running?

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.

Re:OLPC Has Lost Its Way

Why should it matter to some poor kid if their textbooks are accurate, or if their laptop is a method to lock them in to a commercial relationship rather than a way to bootstrap local computer knowledge? Surely the kid won't know the difference or care?

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.

A question of good faith

Many of the people who paid for the buy one, give one did so with the idea that they were spreading Open Source as well as getting computers into the hands of children that otherwise would not have them. Now that may or may not be a good thing, but that is why people thought they were doing. When you take people's money it is better to keep faith with them.

Heresy : Think of the children?

Last time I checked, I thought the goal of One Laptop Per Child was just that, One Laptop Per Child. It wasn't "come up with a way to push Linux everywhere"... they just used Linux because it happened to be free.

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.

I just don't see the point of running Sugar on top of Windows or Windows on the OLPC. The only reasons for running Windows over Linux are related to drivers or Windows software. Let's look at those. Out of the box, Linux supports far more devices than Windows, and driver installers simply won't work well for the OLPC user community. And what Windows software does Negroponte think people will want to run on the OLPC? Sugar on Windows would require a lot of porting, and it's unlikely that it would work particularly well. If you want an educational software environment on Windows, get Squeak and eToys.

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.

Sugar is the problem

I see no problem with allowing XP, if MS wants to pay for the development. Sugar is so slow and unusable (yes I've used it recently and thoroughly) that it actually gives XP a chance (but not a good one) of achieving comparable responsiveness.

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:Education and Secrets don't Mix.

And again, how do we not know that you aren't also part of twitter's schemes?