[Olpc-open] Attempt to summarize Daniel Olivera's (UTUTO) complaints to OLPC

[Antonio Ognio]

Hi there,

  This is Antonio Ognio, from Lima-Peru. A short interview with Daniel
Olivera from the argentinian UTUTO project made by a fellow
participant of my LUG's mailing list has been posted (in spanish)
here:

http://www.linux.org.pe/pipermail/linux-plug/2007-February/008994.html

I've made an attempt to summarize Daniel's complaints that i've posted
to my list as well as the argentina at laptop.org list and I'm sharing it
here with you for comments:

a) The laptop comes with no manual explaining the hardware in detail
and how to re-flash the BIOS to support booting other OSes than the
Fedora one shipped with the product.

b) The laptop comes with no documentation aimed at operating system designers

c) The OLPC project has made little to no effort to date in order to
help create local technician teams in the countries receiving the
laptops

d) El proyecto OLPC no ha hecho nada hasta el momento para incentivar
*directamente* una industria local de productos y servicios para la
nueva plataforma OLPC.

d) The OLPC  project has made little to no effort to date in order to
help create local industries of products and services around the new
OLPC platform in the countries receiving the laptops

This is a sincere attempt to sum up Daniel's view on the subject which
might explain a bit his position.

I'm not really sure if he's already presented this issues in proper
channels such as this mailing list before attacking the project in his
presentation from Cuba but I hope this post could help a bit discuss
this issues and specially get opinions from you guys at Fedora, MIT or
involved governments.

Another really interesting point brought to my attention at my local
mailing list by Crhistian, Daniel's interviewer, was the risk of the
laptop from being caught in a "tivoisation" process as explained by
Richard Stallman in a presentation from the 21st April 2006
transcripted here:

http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/fisl-rms-transcript.en.html

I guess this could be another interesting issue to discuss since this
practice is being designed to be incompatible with the GPL v3,
something to take into account for it's potential implications to the
future of the project's software development.

Hope all of this is useful talk, thanks for reading.

Antonio.
Lima-Perú.