thelinuxlink.net

It's taken a remarkably short time for the One Laptop Per Child project to change from positioning itself as the saviour of children in developing countries to becoming a toady for Microsoft.

In an interview with Business Week recently, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the project, is quoted as saying that the organisation now needs to be managed "more like Microsoft."

And in keeping with this, this modern-day Moses has also said, according to OLPCNews , that Microsoft and the OLPC are in discussion on how to release Windows XP for the XO, the laptop, which the project claims, will "provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves."

That latter bit sounds like one of the Microsoft ads that screen on free-to-air TV in Australia.

OLPC will need to redraft its core principles , especially the fifth and last one which uptil now said "Free and open source". Today, rather appropriately, someone has edited that to read "Free and Open source (unless it's Microsoft)."

This principle has some wonderful prose; permit me to quote a few lines: "A world of great software and content is necessary to make this project succeed, both open and proprietary. Children need to be able to choose from all of it. In our context of learning where knowledge must be appropriated in order to be used, it is most appropriate for knowledge to be free. Further, every child has something to contribute; we need a free and open framework that supports and encourages the very basic human need to express."