XP on XO: Negroponte has lost his bearings
Summary: At ZD's Hardware 2.0 blog, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes cites this quote from former OLPC developer Ivan Krstic about Nicholas Negroponte's rapidly shifting mission statement:In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission.
At ZD's Hardware 2.0 blog, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes cites this quote from former OLPC developer Ivan Krstic about Nicholas Negroponte's rapidly shifting mission statement:
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.
Nicholas Negroponte has been reinventing OLPC like crazy trying to justify running Windows XP on the green machine. Wayan Ota at OLPC News points to this recent version Nick posted to a mailing list:
To eliminate poverty and create world peace by providing education to the poorest and most remote children on the planet by making them more active in their own learning, through collaborative and creative activities, connected to the Internet, with their own laptop, as a human right and cost free to them.
Well, even that does make it seem like it's about education – "making them more active in their own learning." That squares with the idea of Sugar – an operating system that makes it possible for children like that to create their own programs. How does using XP accomplish that or collaboration or creativity?
In any case, it's not the original mission statement or even the latest version. Here's the original:
OLPC is not at heart a technology program and the XO is not a product in any conventional sense of the word. We are non-profit: constructionism is our goal; XO is our means of getting there. It is a very cool, even revolutionary machine, and we are very proud of it. But we would also be delighted if someone built something better, and at a lower price.
So, constructionism is out and human rights are in. What matters to Negroponte now is getting laptops out there – somehow, magically, world peace, education and creativity will spring up by sheer dint of distributing laptops. Only Negroponte can't do this without governments ponying up to buy millions of the things. And they won't do that if it runs some weird-ass Sugar OS. They will buy machines that run Windows.
So the question sits there: What is the point of the whole effort? To make an improvement in the developing world – to increase tech education, or substantive education, or enable software businesses, or connect people to the outside world, or drive Internet access?
Or just to sell computers? Right now Nicholas Negroponte looks like the computer salesman in the old joke: What's the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman? The car salesman knows when he's lying to you.
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Talkback
We need to see the XP offering.
If it also becomes a low end business desktop competing directly with Dell, Asus, Lenovo, so be it, but let's not forget the original mission, again, in spite of Negroponte.
TripleII
XO is just another cheap laptop
It's the same vision lost on the Linux developers
If education is actually the key goal, then what does it matter what it runs on, as long as the kids have them to use?
Wrong question
Try again
It's not what it runs [u]on[/u], it's what it [u]runs[/u].
Sugar is (was?) revolutionary, [b]child[/b] oriented learning tool. Turning the XO into a cheap imitation of a Dell loses all that.
because xp
Sorry 'bout that
Bad fingers! <smack> Bad,bad fingers!
Self teach themselves what?
You kinda sound like the guys that Guiding Light is talking about: Give them [i]only[/i] Linux so that they won't grow up to use or program on Windows.
Can't do that with Windows...
Anyway, using and programming for one OS or another is similar enough that once you get it on one you can do another.
As for the world around them Sugar already offers lots of that and more.
As yet we haven't seen the desktop that Windows will provide but I'm gonna bet that it's the standard business oriented desktop that won't do a thing to engage a child to actually learn about the world around them.
Wanna take me up on that?
ttfn
John
Boy, talk about losing sight of the goal
It's not about Windows vs Linux
Knowing how to operate Excel, Word, and Windows XP is really setting the bar low. That's bare minimum computer literacy. It doesn't teach the critical thinking that the XO laptop should be teaching.
The point is the XO laptop should be that it's [b]open[/b], allowing children to explore beyond the simple mechanics of an OS, be it XP or Linux.
By the time the children become adults, both XP and Linux will probably no longer exist. The point of the XO laptop is not to convert them to Linux enthusiasts. The point of the XO laptop is that the openness of the XO laptop allows children to understand how software and hardware work -- leveraging critical thinking and theoretical skills over pragmatic applied skills that will be obsolete 15 years from now anyway.
Currently, GNU/Linux allows children to do this. So does other free (as in libre) software. XP (and other proprietary OSes such as Mac) does not.
I'd argue that the people arguing about the OS (both the Linux and the Windows fanboys) are being short sighted: by the time the children using XO laptops become adults, both Windows and Linux will be replaced by something completely different.
FLOSS exposes the theory behind the software, and what they learn from the computer science inside it will be applicable 10, 15, and 20 years from now.
This is a battle between the Free Software and closed-source software. closed-source software is fine for teaching the next generation practical skills, similar to teaching typing and how to operate a cash register or calculator.
Free and Open Source software, however, can not only teach these practical skills, but also teach children the theory and critical and open thinking that puts them a step ahead.
and what OS did you learn to program on?
Was it propriety? ("closed-source")
Does that mean you are unable to develop software?
You can write as much software on MS as LX, you just have more tools to do it with.
You do realize that not all that long ago, pretty much only IBM OS's ran on IBM's. Same thing with most computer manufactures and their OS's.
All this is about bringing technology to the 3rd world.
How many of them posses a genius that will make our lives better in our future?
"a battle between the Free Software and closed-source"
They are OS's not religions.
Unbelievable...
I want them in the hands of the kids.
Maybe Negroponte can be squeezed out and the original vision laptops (both Sugar and XP, given the above) get into the hands of those for which it was intended.
TripleII
Not all Linux developers have lost sight of the license ramifications
It isn't about getting [i][b]Linux[/b][/i] in the hands of as many children as possible. It's about getting [i][b]free and open[/b][/i] software into children's hands, which gives both the students and teachers an open textbook of software to learn from and use.
Negroponte should resign
Windoze has a proven record of dumbing people down.
So Should RMS
the OLPC project.
Huh?
Let's try to get this through your head. RMS is not the guru or messiah of the FOSS movement nor does he actively participate in projects such as Linux in spite of his insistence in calling it GNU/Linux which is it not.
What Stallman did was make much of the FOSS movement possible though one can convincingly argue that it wasn't Stallman and the FSF that popularized it but Torvalds and Linux.
FOSS needs Stallman (the puritan) in the same way as the shrink wrap license proprietary world needs Gates (similarly the puritan) as much as FOSS needs Torvalds (the practical visionary) and the proprietary world needs Jobs (the same).
Anyway, Stallman can't resign from something he wasn't a part of and showed little or no interest in till this little tiff broke out.
ttfn
John
Don't Tar All Developers with the Same Brush
zealot brush. As Kristc's post shows, there were developers
giving wholeheartedly of themselves to advance the stated
goals of this project. Unfortunately, they were caught
between the followers of RMS, who sabotaged the project
by pushing the FSF (Free Software Foundation) agenda at
the expense of the project's goals, and between the grand
incompetence of Negroponte.
That was the most stunning part of Kristc's post: that OLPC
had NO deployment plan. I guess this could be called
"Constructivist Deployment". With all the shoulder rubbing
and glad handing that Negroponte did with leaders of
development and and aid organizations, you'd think he
might have asked them about logistic and deployment
issues.
At the end of the day, I think what doomed this project
was too many people only really interested in creating a
cool gadget (albeit for a worthy cause), with not enough
people wanting to do the HARD WORK of deployment and
implementation.
RE: XP on XO: Negroponte has lost his bearings
developing communities regarding poverty, education, potable
water, and hunger issues are going to be stopped at a
toolbooth by the region's rulers and commercial interests.
Windows may be the cost for proceeding and OLPC figures half
a loaf is better than nothing. Isn't that the age old dilemma? I
saw a quote where the cost of the machine is raised 3 dollars
for Windows and 7 dollars for Windows compatible hardware
and while $10 isn't a lot to US eyes, I think it is significant
increase where per capita income is sub $100-500.
I think I can see the silhouette of the accommodation. The
Gates Foundation gives money to a government which now may
buy the XO and then buys Windows licenses from a government
connected vendor and distributes to government-supporting
communities, with maybe a few falling off the truck along the
way to streamline conveyance. Meanwhile, no embarrassing
counter-examples to the assertion that personal computing ==
Microsoft.
My guess, in 9 years there will be 10th anniversary stories
about OLPC with the coda that they weren't as effective as
hoped in raising education levels. Local corruption will be
fingered as a contributing factor. Microsoft and Intel will not be
blamed, and yet, it seems to me it was more important to them
to preserve a market than to facilitate education.
First world sales are slowing
I dont really think that Gates Foundation put strings on govt spending -- at least not so directly. But third-world government is not known for risk-taking for the most part. This is a case of "nobody ever got fired for ..."
The vision was a fundamentally different computer, not just a cheap wintel computer. Intel is selling one of those. OLPC can't compete on price. But Neg never wanted to make support make of the organization. You cant ask ministers to take a leap of faith on non-MSFT and then not offer support. His vision was, the kids will learn to fix it themselves. While I agree the kids will learn how these computers work, that idea is absurd.
Neg's idea was always govts will buy millions of these. XP is a chance for him sell millions to govt, since they wouldnt buy millions of Sugar-based XOs. He should have offered them up to the world to fund the machines for the kids. Instead, they will get a green wintel machine.
How revolutionary.