[OLPC-SF] Microsoft Is Joining Low-Cost Laptop Project - New York Times

[Sameer Verma]

jim wrote:
> (nobody stopped me...) 
>   
Keep going chief!!!
>    having a charming and inspiring leader is 
> highly useful, but everyone has limitations, 
> such as movie stars who've become presidents 
> or governors. i worry that people with the 
> ability to move others through words may in 
> positions of leadership take an overly simple 
> approach to stressful situations. 
>   

Luckily, with commons projects like CC or FOSS, opinionated leadership
doesn't matter that much because responsibility and direction are
distributed. That said, yes the leadership can send the wrong message
through the press and media, and one quick look at Technorati's search
for OLPC will show you the mess that press releases have created.

>    the phrase "we should become more like 
> microsoft" has as its essential semantic the 
> right idea of the need for more disciplined 
> coordination, especially in operations, but 
> the phrasing has a straight-jacketing effect. 
>    a less colorful, less inspiring, phrasing 
> such as "we need to improve operations" 
> might have a better overall effect. 
>
>   
I completely agree. From an outsourcing perspective, OLPC is simply
getting work done by outsourcing it. The hardware was outsourced to AMD,
the body to fuseproject, the OS was outsourced to Redhat, etc. and
because Redhat relies on a commons model, the proverbial cat got out of
the bag.

I am all for a Linux kernel + Sugar, but in my opinion, the argument
should be that Linux + Sugar makes the best sense due to its unbeatable
performance, customizability, etc. and not simply because its innards
are in a read/write configuration for the public at large. Currently
Sugar is slow, buggy and way behind schedule. That's where all this
noise comes from and the likes of Microsoft step in and show that they
can run XP on it and its boots faster ,etc. Of course, I still haven't
seen any videos of Sugar running on top of XP, and I seriously doubt if
they (MSFT) have any intentions of doing so.


> (who's that knocking at my door?) 
>   
Opportunity ;-)

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/