Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 24th Apr 2008 07:50 UTC, submitted by happykid
The road to the One Laptop Per Child has been riddled with humps and bumps, such as hardware issues, the failure of the 'G1G1' scheme, and the inability to reach the USD 100 price mark, culminating in the resignation of the project's president yesterday. Now, Negroponte, the project's founder and chairman, has stated something that might alienate the project's strongest supporters even further: the OLPC might evolve into using Windows XP only.
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Member since:
2007-04-23
I think the OLPC foundation missed an important point in the design of the XO, and they are missing it still: Anything given as aid to the poor is likely to be diverted to the black market if it has any potential black market value.
A laptop that can (or even worse, does) run Windows is infinitely more valuable on the black market than a laptop that only runs Linux or, even better, only runs software written for this particular machine.
Choosing an x86 processor was a bad choice because it enables Windows. Selling XO PCs identical to the donated ones to private users was a mistake, as it gives private people who have an XO PC plausible deniability about having bought it on the black market. And actually putting Windows on the machine is making it even worse.
What they should have done is:
- Use an ARM processor or some other non-x86 processor. ARM has the added advantage of offering more processing power per watt.
- Use a non-standard OS. This need not be an open source OS, as long as the OLPC foundation could get it at little or no cost. If ARM was chosen, a version of RISC OS might have been suitable -- it is robust, there are tons of educational software for it, it has low hardware demands and it is sufficiently non-mainstream to make it of low black-market value. It is not free, but I'm sure the OLPC foundation would have gotten an excellent deal from the owners, quite likely even at no cost for PCs donated to children in developing countries.
- Making commercially sold PCs markedly distinct from the donated PCs. This could be done simply by changing the colour of the green plastic bits to, say, blue or red. This would not cost much extra, as the same molds could be used, but it would be very costly for a black marketeer to pass of a donated PC as a free market PC.