Re: [Fsuk-manchester] MS Windows on the OLPC

[Richard Smedley]

On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 07:42 +0100, Lucy wrote:
> I know that yesterday I was having problems thinking that proprietary
> software was immoral, although I knew it was 'bad'. Today, I think
> that things are much simpler, forcing kids to use proprietary software
> because 'everyone else is using it' or because 'it trains them for
> business' is wrong, completely morally wrong. It scares me to see how
> much influence one company has and it frustrates me that kids will be
> missing out on valuable learning because of the interest of business.

This move was inevitable - if not OLPC, then a rival, but
OLPC had got itself in a mess with poor business decisions, 
and an approach that is heavily debated and covered elsewhere
on t`interWeb.

Let's look at this from another angle :)

Aside from the extra hardware cost, MS is charging just 
US$3.00 for their OS. An even more drastic cut than
the halving of the price to fit it on the 9in EEEPC.

Secondly this is a modified version of the 7yr-old
XP OS.

Thirdly it doesn't support all of the hardware (mesh networking) 
or the Sugar interface.

So, while for anyone who saw the XO roll-out as a chance to
introduce GNU/Linux wholesale to the two-thirds world the
XP move is deeply disappointing, there are three silver
linings to the proprietary software cloud:

Microsoft is being forced to follow the market diktat
that the OS is not something you can really charge for.
In doing so it's beginning to lose one of its greatest 
revenue streams (while it is drawing flak for corrupting
ISO to protect the other). Anyone with an EEE can transfer
their licence to another PC (actual law over-rides the
EULA); this will also have an eventual impact on sales.

Businesses have already forced MS to extend the life and
availability of XP. No-one wants the DRM machine that
is Vista. The codebase for MS Windows is unmaintainable.
It's difficult to see how they can maintain their model over
the next couple of Windows releases.

While end users will have little choice about what is shipped
on their XO laptop, the fact that the choice is between the
latest GNU system with a great interface for younger
children vs a cut-down proprietary interface that doesn't
fit the hardware so well will, in some places at least,
send the message that actually MS is not the best choice.

Meanwhile Free Software will continue to grow, and reach
more people - particularly through embedded devices, sff
machines like the EEE's imitators, and (eventually)
OpenMoko - just not as fast as if 8 million XOs had
shipped with GNU this year.

 - Richard