One Laptop Per Child worthwhile at any price
Nicholas Negroponte's announcement that the final version of his One Laptop Per Child initiative will cost $175 and run Windows has led to a wee bit of Windows triumphalism.
The fact is that the native operating system used by any piece of hardware is no longer the big deal it was even two years ago.
As Mainsoft demonstrates it's not that hard to port applications. Virtualization is fast becoming a mainstream technology. Competition is, in fact, moving up the stack, to applications, and open source application exist in the Windows world just as they do in Linux.
When Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes that the OLPC is now "a blow against open source," what he's really saying is it's a blow against desktop Linux. And he's right.
But open source and Linux are not the same thing.