Microsoft joins OLPC

[Ted Gould]

On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 21:01 -0700, Dennis Kibbe wrote:
> I agree with everyone else that this is a sad day. Following 
> on the ISO fiasco I can't see it as any other than more of 
> M$ Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

No, I think this is much simpler.  MS realizes that if they loose out on
the netbook market they loose in an massive future market.  The OLPC was
the first and the most recognized of these today.  It's a good thing to
put in ads.

But, more over, besides the PR bump I don't see this as a significant
loss for Linux.  The reality is that the OLPC project ha(d|s) tons of
problems, I mean they basically messed up on 16 thousand orders that
they did have.  In the future there will be more netbooks, and I imagine
that a lot of them will run Linux.  Those will start to be more
interesting and where we should be focusing our attention as a
community.

> The openness of both the hardware (coreboot) and the software stack
> in the XO was unique, so much so that RMS is (maybe that should be was
> now) planning to use the XO in place of his Thinkpad which because it
> didn't have a proprietary BIOS.

The idea of RMS using a laptop built for children is truly poetic.

		--Ted

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