OLPC goes XP and why
It’s old news. OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) will be default installed with XP. When i first hear it i was wandering why in so small hardware people would like heavy OS as XP is? One of biggest advantages with Linux is that Linux can run on really low hardware (good example is damn small linux) so why not choosing Linux? OLPC is using sugar so child won’t have any interaction with OS anyway! Even if does, why XP?
I started to dig in, i was really curious about this. I found thousands of articles on this issue and i was looking for conclusion. First of all I’ll write down why not XP:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic
&articleId=9079798&pageNumber=2
But that’s not the slimmed-down version of XP that Negroponte told the AP Microsoft had been working on for about a year, apparently with the XO in mind. Instead, for most low-cost laptops, Microsoft is licensing the full Service Pack 2 version of Windows XP Home, which gobbles up 1.1GB of disk space. Moreover, patches and updates such as Service Pack 3 will add about 165MB to XP each year, according to Microsoft (download PDF).
The current XO, meanwhile, comes with only 1GB of storage. That’s more than enough for the existing environment, which includes the Sugar GUI and stripped-down versions of Fedora, Firefox and other open-source software. Together, they take up only 200MB, leaving 800MB for students’ files.
Using only stripped-down versions of open-source apps has its downsides. For instance, the XO comes with Gnash, an open-source media player, instead of Adobe’s Flash player, which is free but not open source.
Gnash is compatible with Flash apps only until Version 8, according to OLPC’s own online documentation. Many popular children’s Web sites such as Webkinz.com and Disney.com require Flash 9.0.
I was laughing at this. For installing XP you’ll need more space then OLPC can have and they will recharge it 3$ per child. So this is perfect, they will need to dump prices for bigger HD and for each laptop it will recharge 3$ for Microsoft! They already sold 500 000 units, if they sell more 500k it’s 1.5M for Microsoft.
And what’s the point of gnash? Gecko (firefox) is working perfect with adobe flash plug-in [link]. Why they choice gnash instead of adobe plug-in?
I decided to read from insiders and i found interesting blog from Ivan Krstić. Ivan Krstić was director of security architecture at One Laptop per Child but he quit. He wrote:
Sleight of hand
But really, I digress. The point is that OLPC was supposed to be about learning, not free software. And the most upsetting part of the Windows announcement is not that it exposed the actual agendas of a number of project participants which had nothing to do with learning, but that Nicholas’ misdirection and sleight of hand were allowed to stand.The whole “we’re investing into Sugar, it’ll just run on Windows” gambit is sheer nonsense. Nicholas knows quite well that Sugar won’t magically become better simply by virtue of running on Windows rather than Linux. In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He’s told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its “availability” as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster.
In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.
Do i need to add more? It’s almost one man call! Nicholas who invented OLPC like more windows then Linux so he choice windows.
Conclusion: OLPC has nice idea but not obligation! It has nothing to do with ideology despite it has nice name (One Lap Top Per Child). Child will need to pay more $3 only for microsoft and more money for HD. Will it stay 100$? I honestly wish…
Unless MS won’t pay for difference, prices will rise, less computer will be selled, no ideology to achieve…
I wish I’m wrong…
