Microsoft joins OLPC

[Dennis Kibbe]

Ted Gould <ted at gould.cx> writes:

> 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.

Well put Ted.

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

I was at the FSF office in Boston in March when Richard, Justin and JAG (FSF sysadmins) were trying the work out the details of using the XO. The USB bus didn't have enough power for the external hard drive and the non-proprietary USB wifi dongle to be used at the same time. The XO keyboard was impractical for adults to type on so Richard put a Happy Hacker keyboard on risers to allow it to sit on top of the XO keyboard.

On the plus side, he didn't need to used the big under the laptop external battery that he had for the Thinkpad.

Dennisk

-- 
"Free as in Freedom"
Free Software Foundation