[Foundation-l] OLPC & Windows?

[Andrew Gray]

On 06/12/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hoi,
> There is a difference between the hardware being able to run Windows and
> the OLPC project running Windows. What the OLPC project develops is
> hardware that runs Linux and software that runs on top of Linux.

Quite. I read the actual basis of the story as being:

"If we hack our system around in certain ways it can run Windows, too,
which could be interesting. We'll see what we can do with this, but
it's worth looking into"

rather than

"Oooh! We can run Windows! Now let's convert everything over to being
proprietary!"

There is a big difference between a little bit of testing to sketch
out a possibility for some third-party development, and committing to
something as The Grand Solution. There's nothing in the original news
story which says "the OLPC will be a Microsoft product, look, here's
our grand evil plan"; it says "the OLPC may be able to run Windows, at
some indefinite point as an aftermarket extension, and both we and MS
are interested by the possibilities".

The goal of this project isn't to serve as some kind of great
free-software evangelism program, or to put one in the eye of
Microsoft - the goal of this project is to provide a cheap, reliable,
and widespread educational computing infrastructure to the developing
world. This sort of thing doesn't compromise that - it just means that
there is the possibility for expansion in interesting ways in the
future. Yes, that expansion may be commercial. Does that in some way
mean the project is now a bad thing? Does it mean that we should
pre-emptively write off the prospect of making this infrastructure
expandable, because MS and their ilk will always creep in somewhere if
we don't lock down and kneecap the machines at birth?

The capacity to expand these machines by running Windows is also the
capacity to expand these machines in a dozen different ways, many of
which haven't been thought of. Windows is simply a nice driving force
to get the capacity there.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk