Fwd: {OLPC Nepal} Re: [FOSSNepal] Re: Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP

[Prakhar Agarwal]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bibek Paudel <eternalyouth at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 6:18 PM
Subject: {OLPC Nepal} Re: [FOSSNepal] Re: Report: OLPC may eventually switch
from Linux to Windows XP
To: foss-nepal at googlegroups.com, olpcnepal at googlegroups.com,
nepal at lists.laptop.org



Hi all,
While I personally think it is bad for OLPC to switch to Windows XP,
here a few observations that I have made:

1. Any development/education project meant for third world countries
is best when it is natively grown. A top down approach where some guy
in Boston teaches us how to change things in our neighbourhood is
never likely to understand and respect our situation and problems. He
has other priorities. A bottom-up approach should be devised where
grassroot organizations from different parts of the world collaborate
to form a mother organization that works in their benefit. Compare
this to Nepal's political situation where every other politician/media
claims to represent the people and be working for them. Things won't
that way in technology too.

2. Nicholas Negroponte is a man hungry of some position in history of
business and humanity, both. He thinks increasing the sales of laptops
is more important than the growing impact it is creating. Selling a
qarter of a million of laptops is a success by any means for any
profit-organization. I don't understand how it is not sufficient in
case of a first-of-its-kind project by a non-profit organization.

3. Nicholas Negroponte doesn't care. Using Windows in XOs has many
implications. Besides cost and the performance of the laptops, it
means you are forcing a company's products on all children. Compare
that to a government policy whereby it makes every school going
children mandatory to wear dresses from a certain dress-designing
company or study books from a certain publisher (eg. Ekta publishers).
Thats why we have a government book publisher and curriculum designer
in Nepal and government can't recommend any other books. I don't
understand how someone can impose the monopoly of using a
vendor-specific software on all kids. And why governments all over the
world should abide by that.

4. The issue of "amorphic" development of XO as said by Negroponte is
at best ridiculous. Having the best of the world's technology,
engineers and money at MIT, it shocks me how he allowed a project of
OLPC's scale fall at the hands of people who neither could have a good
architect for the software or the capacity to develop them
"morphically". Had he never heard of the term "software engineering"
before? Why was the decision taken in first place?

5. What are all the people spread all over supposed to make of the
recent developments? At the behest of a single man or a group of such
men, should they be forced to change their working style, philosophy
and way of seeing things?

6. I wish someone starts a fork of Sugar and everything OLPC. Why not
Walter Bender? Start a fork. Or else the people at OLPC, if you have
all the democracy and its powers, why don't you remove such people who
are moving away from the OLPC's original principles? I just hope
something of similar nature happens.

If you agree with me, please forward this message to other mailing
lists of OLPC where people are likely to respond to this issue.

Cheers !
Bibek

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:50 PM, sarose <sarose.joshi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  hey dude! your grandpa is great but you know my uncle Negroponte is
>  fool nonsense because he now hate Linux.
>
>  About Ubuntu, i don't know how to pronounce it. Please teach me as
>  well.
>
>  Try a survey with your friends or co-workers around.  The answer
>  screams cries utterly. Don't forget to submit back to Uncle
>  Negroponte.
>
>  On Apr 24, 4:12 pm, Zico <mailz... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 3:42 PM, sarose <sarose.jo... at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > > yes its bad news and a good lesson for the gnome/kde that has not
come
>  > > up with user friendly UI till this date.
>  >
>  > You are very wrong, brother! Don`t you see the *blinking things* of
>  > gnome/kde? And, how do you define "friendly user interface"? What more
do
>  > you expect from Gnome/KDE? Please point out, we will be really glad to
hear
>  > that.
>  >
>  > just stop saying linux is ready for desktop.
>  >
>  > Why should we do that??
>  >
>  > > neither its ready for my
>  > > dad nor its ready for my little brother.
>  >
>  > I don`t know about your dad or younger brother, but Ubuntu is ready for
my
>  > grandfather. Now, i am teaching my grandmother to use computer ( in one
>  > word, Ubuntu ).
>  >
>  > all its ready
>  >
>  > > for is server only.
>  >
>  > Very wrong.
>  > By the way, which distro do you use?
>  >
>  > --
>  > Best,
>  > Z
>  >
>



--
Bibek Paudel.
http://blog.bibekpaudel.com.np/
==============================

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OLPC Nepal
http://olpcnepal.org
http://wiki.olpcnepal.org
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-- 
Prakhar Agarwal
Technical Head - Library R&D Team
3rd Year
B.Tech, IT
JIIT University,Noida
"Life is the greatest teacher"
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