Recognizing why OLPC is swithing to Windows

[mathcreative]

Pardon me for not being an expert, but I just read an article on Ars about why OLPC might be switching from linux to windows. Why because OLPC is not interested in supporting linux or open source, their interested in getting laptops in children hands as fast as they possibly can. The more laptops they order, the less each laptop costs. Microsoft has been know to lobby their OS across the foreign countries OLPC wishes to sell to, making increasingly hard to sell to those countries. Plus most countries are just more used to windows, therefor are less likely to change. So going with microsoft makes transitioning these laptops to these countries much easier. But, the difference between linux and windows is Open Source. Open Source doesn't come with a tax. Those children are going to learn to grow up using windows, and depending on windows, by placing windows pc's into the hands of these children, those children will later on be forced to pay the microsoft tax, because transitioning them from Windows to Linux when they are older is going to be much harder. These coutries believe that windows is better without realizing the consequences of making such a move. Their is a huge chance that OLPC will move their laptops OS to Windows, because which ever os they use, it will not effect the capablities of the laptop it's self. They want the laptop in childrens hands and they don't care how they do it, and they shouldn't. But the future of the technology education is at stake here. Don't get me wrong both Linux and Windows are fine OS's it's just that sticking with Windows means that someone has to pay that proprietiary tax along the road.
Your thoughts Please!

[lad.kocb]

Well, they are not really switching to windows, and they will not abandon the open source, but indeed, XO wit windows XP will be available - as an option. The same thing happened to EEE-PC and will continue to happen to any reasonable replacement of windows, unless we do something.

We must do something - but who are "we"? I think that all people in education and science should start working really hard to reduce and finally stop the stupidizing activities of the Microsoft ecosystem. The inhabitants of this planet are turned into a big bunch of clicking monkeys - just to follow the busines plans and profit projections of the "software giant". We are all touched by it, and it is difficult to put the numbers on the damage.

My estimate is that Microsoft has costed makind about ten years of development in IT implementations. Just a couple of days ago I have learned about one more "proof" for my estimate: the work for people with visual handicap, and also fully blind people, is also centered arround Windows! Clearly, all the work which has gone into this direction is thrown away. The solutions implemented definitely helped some people, no doubt, but the work put in those efforts is lost, it is locked into the windows domain. Just like another activities, much of sofware for laboratory equipment which is locked into windows. Medical and other "professional" software - locked into windows.

And why is the work lost? Commercial products like Mathematica, Matlab, Acrobat reader etc. are developed without
lock into windows, thus they can be made available on any platform with reasonable effort (for e.g. LabView it was apperently a bit more difficult - but possible). Unlike these, many smaller and more specific software products are based entirely in the windows tools, like the visual studio and similar bloatware generators. People who develop these things believe in Microsoft tools, apparently.

So what should all we in science and education see as our duty? Our work is threatened by Microsoft. Their practices and business policies are making our work difficult. Our students and our professors are made stupid by being locked into MS-world and turned into Microsoft zombies, who believe that Microsoft invented text processing and that word format is the only thing useful for scientific communication.

I think we must simply at least scream back when they hit us.
What are the threats now: OOXML - Microsoft's rape of XML, Silverlight - Microsoft's Flash killer (now that flash stopped being a problem for open source ), and Microsoft's "jpeg replacement" - HD Photo format - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR). This all in addition to Microsoft's JScript on webpages, and many other plans they have, like buying Yahoo.

People say: you can just ignore microsoft - but you can not. They make your neighbours and friends into microsoft zombies. They take away your friends and colleagues. It is an objective fact that a person who "believes in Microsoft" has a distorted view of reality by being seriously disinformed.

I scream: please help! This planet is too small for both mankind and Microsoft in its present shape!
At least join the scream.

[PeterP24]

Although maybe both windows and linux are fine, for educational purposes I prefer Linux. It offers much more possibilities and an open mind to those who are using it. And Linux has an faster developing cycle then windows. When you see that Microshaft with it's armies of programmers developes an OS every 2-3 years or even longer you might think that this is the natural way of how things should be. Now I don't know how windows could be a choice in a situation were price matter. Even if microshaft will distribute windows copies freely with those laptops, let's not forget that each installation of windows needs third party application like firewalls and antiviruses which bring aditional costs since they are provided by other companies who can't afford the luxury to offer them freely (actually one may argue that microshaft offers his own solutions for protection, but they offer such a pour protection that even microshaft use third party application instead of their own product). And someone told that windows is offered as an option. Who is to decide? the little child who receives the laptop? what if he hasn't enough knowledge to decide? This remind me of something. In my country, Pascal is taught instead of the more modern C++ (and C++ is more required in industry). The reason is that the teacher doesn't know C++. What if the teacher don't know how to use linux? he doesn't have the knowledge to compare linux with windows. How can he make an valid choice?

Besides, presumming that a child is using windows, and at some point he finds things on the internet like open source guerilla who opposes the freedom offered by microshaft and other craps like this. Such things (the attitude of microshaft regarding the open source movement) are very dangerous since they distort the reality. When you are telling such things instead of developing a product to face the competition, what is the message sent to the whole world? Hey, I'm a big company, and now I have to face the competition. Gosh what can I do? Develope a better product? NO WAY? Instead, I will invest in an agressive publicity, I will spread rumours like the ones above and do all sort of stuff to force companies to use microshaft products. For those of you fortunate enough to live in a democracy I will tell you what other organization approach the problems in the microshaft way. The organization is named usually the communists (which we all know is bad since it legally reintroduced the torture in prisons, brought to starvation millions of people, etc. ..). They usually look for the political monopoly, by physically eliminating their opponents. Once they have the power they start to indoctrinate the population, by telling them that the communist way is the only way - any other political views are prohibited (kind of like Microshaft prohibits the open source ideas). This is possible since they have full control over the mass-media (which can be obtained also with a big budget allocated for promoting activities - microshaft way). If the process succeeds in a generation the communists take the power forever. No one will opposes anymore since the communist doctrine has the power to fully program people. It's easy to see the parallels between communism and microshaft. What if Microshaft succeeds to bound the hardware manufacturers to windows platform (they've tried by the way)? The open source movement will disapear because no OS can resist once it can't provide the proper drivers - an it will not since the manufacturers will release drivers only for windows. The monopoly is installed; microshaft will take over - if they decide that the drivers for pci express are to hard to implement, then the pci express will disapear no matter how fast it is. This is monopoly and it can be extended very well in other directions, not just OS or software development. Like the communism, microshaft imposed an unnatural way in the software development with the purpose to obtain the power (monopoly). The natural way is represented by the open source movement (I don't bother that I pay some money for a product - but I wanna be sure that this product doesn't spy on me, or it doesn't collect information about me for some commercial use. Also it would be nice to see if it is safe enough, if it offers me the quality that the price asked for it require).

When I've first started to use the computer, I've asked a friend : what is the difference between Linux and Windows? the answer was > you can improve Linux in case you need that. There was a general opinion that Linux is good since is free and it offers source control. Still, 10 years ago in this part of the world, everybody was using windows. My friends, all had windows. The games, mostly of them were designed for windows. So I've started myself with windows. In fact I didn't have any other choice (in my mind of course). The internet was an expensive resource, back then, and more important, I didn't have any friend who were using linux. This isn't a good thing for a newbie. The sentiment that you could chose must exist. Today, there are a lot of companies who sell computers with linux preinstalled. I only use Linux for about an year now. Some of my friend who also started with windows tried to use linux but failed. The passage, from windows xp to linux was very hard. Here, in my country there aren't to many linux books. I guess that one who first learn Linux, can make easily the passage to windows since windows is no big deal. So it is important to chose the correct OS to start. If you know you need more from your computer then chose linux. If you like playing games, surfing the internet and listening music linux is still the right OS. But if you like all this stuff, and you don't like the challenges that linux might involve then chose windows (one may argue that windows come with his own challenges like the blue screen - which usually can't be solved or the virus problems which are solved by buying the proper antivirus solution) - there are of course more important things in life then searching the linux forums for a solution.

The biggest threat to open source movement is Microshaft, which is easy to see why : the loss of profit, and monopoly. And my guess is that if the windows source code is made public we will see a lot of interested things, which should not be there. There is hope, regarding these issues. Microshaft is starting to take more seriously the open source movement. While years ago they told that linux is a threat to freedom, today they hold conferences, they try to understand why they are loosing in front of the open source OS-es and more important they steal ideas and implement them in windows.

The solution? We, as users, must help the open source developers in every way we can. We must offer feedback, report bugs, help others users. We must extract everything from our distribution, not to be upset when something isn't working but to scream "I need help" on forums. When we find that we have some piece of hardware for which the Linux driver doesn't exist, we must contact the manufacturer and ask him to develop one. We form a community - the open source community - so far, the open source ideas are straightforward - no one can argue that even a single bad consequence can be derived from these ideas.

Well, I see that I did deviate from the original thread. But I did expose you my point. I do not intend to expose any child to microshaft product; the products themselves doesn't matter; what matter is the philosophy that stay behind them; and I know that most of you agrees with the fact that a child must not embrace this philosophy.

I love Linux because is it constantly force me to learn new things - and I know it force others. It helped me to improve myself, and if a perfect world exists somewhere in this universe, I'm sure that open source, among other things rules in it.

[donjuanmarxist]

This guy is very confused about capitalism microsoft and communism.

[GlennJ]

OLPC is switching to Xp because Sugar is an unfortunate mistake. I was amazed to find it had no file-manager. Some xfce4 flavor of GUI ( there are more options now) would have been far preferable. for that matter, why couldn't they have grafted on Thunar?

Sugar spends a-lot of time hashing through the already hierarchical file system of Linux to reduce it to a history list. How dumb is that?

It is also the most closed "open" system I have ever seen. You cant simply go to the web and download an app- everything has to be repackaged in activities that nothing else runs.

I predict that Microsoft will end up a service added biz like IBM did, and Xp would be a good first entry as an open source platform. All they would have to do is open it!