Re: [Fsfe-uk] Time to boycot OLPC?

[Alex Hudson]

Ian Lynch wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 11:06 +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
>   
> > At the end of the 
> > day, the problem reduces to "selling a free software desktop", and 
> > nobody has really made a profit from that yet.
> >     
>
> Probably because they need to sell a service of which the free desktop
> is part - works for cell phones.
>   

I'm not sure I really buy into that argument, actually. In the mobile 
phone world, the people developing the software are selling a product - 
the phone - and the people delivering the service are the operators. In 
that respect, it's no different to Microsoft developing Windows and an 
ecosystem of businesses supporting it. Mobile phones aren't a services 
play unless you're an operator, and the operators are just resellers.

Fundamentally, I don't really buy into the "free software should be a 
services play" argument though, either. If you're selling a service 
rather than software, the software immediately becomes almost 
irrelevant, and that's basically what has happened to the OLPC project, 
except that there 'education' supplants software, to seed the kind of 
self-learning that 8-bit micros did. They've just realised that you 
don't need free software to do that.

Cheers,

Alex.