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Negroponte is preoccupied with making money off the kids. Intel is preoccupied with making money off the kids. Microsoft is preoccupied with making money off the kids. Steve Jobs was, apparently, also interested in lining Apple's pockets off the kids.

Although I am, as you know, an advocate of Linux, I've also established myself as a critic of Stallman and his peculiar monomania.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone, by this time, that giving any one entity control by using their proprietary software would be a mistake. This is one situation where I have to agree with Richard.

Edited 2008-05-15 01:21 UTC

I don't think so. I think that Negroponte is struggling with the reality that he can't run a project without commercial support -- and he doesn't want the project to be solely commercially-driven. It's a difficult line to walk.



Of course. For-profit companies are motivated by profit. But, I think, if you are fair, you will agree that these companies have hugely downscaled their prices in order to make this project possible. It isn't solely about profit for them. It's about building long-term mindshare which, frankly, is more important than short-term profit.



I disagree. The fact of the matter is that kids don't have to use open source operating systems in order to dabble in open source software. Plenty of open source software is written to run on top of Windows and OS X. Further, there is no reason why a Linux distro couldn't be installed on one of these OLPCs, if a given user needs to use an open source OS. What we have here is a case of Stallman wanting to prevent these kids from even having a laptop in order to protect their "freedom". Quite frankly, the casual observer would probably agree that that is ridiculous and wrong-headed. The overwhelming majority of these kids will not care about or have any interest in the particulars of the OS that they're running. And those that do care have other avenues to pursue (eg. install Linux). So, I would rather err on the side of putting computers in the hands of kids, not protecting some moron's political agenda.

Edited 2008-05-15 20:53 UTC

The worst that can be said of Stallman is that he values children's freedom more than their education. So do I.

Yes, the last thing that they need is to have a new overlord. Bill, Steve, Nicholas, Paul... hard to decide. You can bet that Larry and Jonathan also are hard at work coming up with plausible reasons that this effort requires powerful Sun servers running Oracle. (Of course, Jonathan is secretly planning to switch it to PostgreSQL after the deal is signed, and Larry is secretly planning to switch it to Linux.)

Edited 2008-05-15 01:58 UTC

That's BS and you know it. The reason children have rules as they grow up which are relaxed once they become older is that education must come before freedom. Human beings cannot be free in society before they learn to control themselves and integrate well. Similarly, it's far more useful to teach these children skills that are applicable to their situation such as medicine, information about the natural world, writing and communication, than it is to get them into computer programming or Free Software. Free Software is great and if that's the cheapest and most effiicent way to get the job done, then by all means go with Free Software. But if a proprietary company is donating their work and their software will allow the product to be produced cheaper and more effectively, then Free Software should take a back seat because it is far less important to the vast majority of the kids than the aforementioned skills.

The problem with Stallman is that he seems to lack any sense of perspective. He would rather put a bullet in the head of this project rather than have it use commercial software. So, tell me, would these kids be more free because they lack access to computers and technology? Or would the ability to use open source software running on top of a commercial OS be a reasonable compromise? I think it is.