[sugar] [support-gang] Microsoft

[Kurt H Maier]

>>    If XO sales are so unrestricted, why can't I buy one at laptop.org?
> Are you willing to buy 100 or more?

Willing? Yes.  Able? No.  Are you willing to let free-market
capitalism drive a not-for-profit project aimed at developing nations?

>Be realisitic.  Our software isn't customizable beyond a hypothetical.  We offer no man pages, no GCC, no source on board, and no training on how to >use program.  Before we can make the argument of being more customizeable we need to actually document how to change things and supply such >information on the XO.
>
>A Kindle can still allow you to read a book.  Is closed source as useful as open source?  No.  Is DRM a good thing for children in the third workd?  No.  >But is a calculator better than nothing?  Yes.  Keep that in mind.

A book can also allow you to read a book.  I'd rather provide children
with royalty-free slide rules than annually-licensed graphing
calculators.


>Let's also remember that the OLPC project was orignally planned to be open hardware as well.  If that had happened, as it should, we would be in the >same boat now.

Yeah.  Let's look at RT -- and all the issues with connectivity, which
would be WAY easier to root out if we had access to the wifi firmware.
 Third-party startups could be turning out replacement parts -- if we
had access to schematics.  G1G1 donors and at least one target nation
were unsatisfied with gnash, but Flash is non-free.  Every single time
proprietary ANYTHING wormed its way in under a banner of practicality,
it bit us in the ass later.  And so how do we work toward openness?
By working hard to let in *more* proprietary garbage.

> Sugar on a free stack has to beat windows by it's quality.  This is my goal and this is my belief.

I agree.


On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Seth Woodworth <seth at isforinsects.com> wrote:
> The golden rule doesn't say: "Treat others as you have been treated,"  It
> says to treat others as you would like to be treated.

The golden rule also has absolutely nothing to do with reality when
you're dealing with a global megacorporation with a proven track
record of illicitly stamping out anything that even almost threatened
it.

> What is being proposed is that if you want it to run Microsoft apps then
> countries can pay an extra $10.  This gives *them* a handycap in the game
> and makes it that much easier for us.

A "handicap" which microsoft can spin into huge savings and cheap
vocational training to produce a generation of Visual Basic coders and
outsourced Office support drones.  Sorry, but that's what happened in
all of Microsoft's other "outreach" zones.


> I agree.  Let's start a dialog with Ubuntu!  Mark Shuttleworth has mentioned
> OLPC favorably on this blog a few times, and much of the community has been
> interested in getting Ubuntu running on the XO.  There is a need for a full
> desktop as well as a sugar UI for these machines.  I run Debian on my XO
> personally and I would love to have a fast Xubuntu going on it.

I am a million percent behind this and I will do whatever I can to
help you with this idea.

> But I do know that Quanta isn't going to let OLPC open source the hardware
> schematics that they own until sale volumes are much higher.

Quanta isn't going to release anything ever.  Just like Marvell.


-- 
# Kurt H Maier