OSNews

I agree completely - children from 3rd world countries will never afford the expensive licences that they are offered - so.. they will pirate, as people do everywhere except the US, Western Europe (not the EU - the western part of the EU, and piracy is still there, just not on the same scale as in Eastern Europe) and maybe Japan and Korea. In every other country piracy is rampant - in fact if you are a home user or you work in small to medium bussiness its 99% certain that you use pirated software, and in some countries the government uses also. Guess what happens if Microsoft succeeds in enforsing its patents and licences - it will lose its market dominance - because what is really important is mind-share, and that is the reason linux isn't catching on where its expected - it competes with the non-open-source but still free windows, not the expensive windows you get in the developed countries.

So the goal of the XO laptop is to teach computers - about their possibilities, their charm, their basic concepts, not how to get warez, operate a firewall, or use an office suite. The latter skills are aging very quickly actually - in my I've seen high school textbooks that teach WindowsME and 2000 and whatever office suite and photoshop that was available on that time, despite our government having bought newer XP licenses - those particular textbooks were worthless because they taught things like which menu->submenu->option to click or right click.

I think the XO encourages intelligence and creativity and teaches you not how to cram specific windows concepts, but to enjoy and discover, and to expect a better interface and understand that being computer literate doesn't mean how to pirate an antivirus.