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

[Alex Hudson]

Ian Lynch wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 14:50 +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
>   
> > argument though, either. If you're selling a service 
> > rather than software, the software immediately becomes almost 
> > irrelevant,
> >     
>
> That depends on volume. If I sell 2 million laptops and save $5 each on
> Windows licenses it's still 10 million and the margin on these machines
> is going to get smaller and smaller.

Well, you've hit the nail right on the head there as far as OLPC is 
concerned: they're not selling millions of machines. The $5 saving of 
Windows tax is illusory until you actually sell the same volume: if I 
make $10 a unit and sell 2 million, and you make $15/unit but only sell 
500k, I'm still ahead and I have four times more customers.

I think what OLPC is discovering is that there are sufficient customers 
who want Windows that the dent in their costs is likely to be more than 
offset by the increase in volume they can ship. That's speculation, 
though, I admit.

> On that scale I might well be
> better to design and source my own machines. I think Mandriva is
> profitable and it does Linux desktops. Not sure about Canonical but they
> have enough reserves to keep going for quite a while. While there is
> Linux desktop development I might as well tap into it.
>   

Well, I agree with that (to the extent that you realise you're dependent 
on the investment of others ;), but again, it doesn't matter how cheap 
you can get it unless customers want it, and I think that's the problem 
OLPC have bumped into.

> >  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.
> >     
>
> You don't if the software license costs come down to zero or very close
> to it. Free software is likely to be instrumental in making that happen
> though and then as stuff moves to the web the desktop OS will become
> irrelevant anyway. I think that is probably worse for MS than for anyone
> else. 
>   

Possibly. I'm not sure; I think that would require a much greater degree 
of commoditization than currently exists and is likely to exist in the 
next 10-15 years. I don't think price is the issue at this point; you 
basically can't give a free desktop away at the moment.

Cheers,

Alex.