The past days found me attending the Yale A2K2
conference in New Haven where an insipring group of people were
discussing issues of the knowledge society and how to enable Access to
Knowledge for everyone. Naturally, Free
Software played a major role in this, as it is the only way for
governments to have control over their IT infrastruture and
policy.
One of the items discussed was also the "One Laptop Per Child" project, but
much to my dismay I had to find out about the latest
briefing by Nicholas Negroponte on the OLPC. Apparently the OLPC
is now catering to the needs and interests of Microsoft and is working
to update the hardware to fit the needs of Microsoft Windows. This would then allow the laptop to be shipped with the $3
Microsoft package. The article shows no reasons for this move,
which raises price of the '100$ laptop' to 175$ and is obviously
counter-productive to the originally stated goals of the OLPC. So I'd
be very interesting in finding out the details of that deal.
As Adrian
Kingsley-Hughes writes, this is clearly a strong blow against Free
Software. It also seems like the end of the OLPC project as we know it, since now
Microsoft will most likely be spending significant resources "nudging" governments
into spreading the OLPC with Microsoft Windows to turn children as
early as possible into habitual users of Microsoft.
In effect, OLPC now really appears to stand for "One (Microsoft)
License Per Child."
Several people who work in development were already sceptical
whether simply putting technology into the hands of children would
solve any problem, especially when the funds spent would be enough to
build and maintain very well-equipped public schools.
When adding this latest bit of information to the picture, indeed
it seems that countries should very carefully consider the idea of
whether they want to spend that money on getting their children
dependent on Microsoft.
From a sustainable development perspective they should even
consider turning down the laptops when Microsoft will offer them
gratis in combination with Microsoft Windows -- which seems the
logical next step.
