>> If XO sales are so unrestricted, why can't I buy one at laptop.org? > Are you willing to buy 100 or more?
Willing? Yes. Able? No. Are you willing to let free-market capitalism drive a not-for-profit project aimed at developing nations? >Be realisitic. Our software isn't customizable beyond a hypothetical. We >offer no man pages, no GCC, no source on board, and no training on how to >use >program. Before we can make the argument of being more customizeable we need >to actually document how to change things and supply such >information on the >XO. > >A Kindle can still allow you to read a book. Is closed source as useful as >open source? No. Is DRM a good thing for children in the third workd? No. >>But is a calculator better than nothing? Yes. Keep that in mind. A book can also allow you to read a book. I'd rather provide children with royalty-free slide rules than annually-licensed graphing calculators. >Let's also remember that the OLPC project was orignally planned to be open >hardware as well. If that had happened, as it should, we would be in the >>same boat now. Yeah. Let's look at RT -- and all the issues with connectivity, which would be WAY easier to root out if we had access to the wifi firmware. Third-party startups could be turning out replacement parts -- if we had access to schematics. G1G1 donors and at least one target nation were unsatisfied with gnash, but Flash is non-free. Every single time proprietary ANYTHING wormed its way in under a banner of practicality, it bit us in the ass later. And so how do we work toward openness? By working hard to let in *more* proprietary garbage. > Sugar on a free stack has to beat windows by it's quality. This is my goal > and this is my belief. I agree. On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Seth Woodworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The golden rule doesn't say: "Treat others as you have been treated," It > says to treat others as you would like to be treated. The golden rule also has absolutely nothing to do with reality when you're dealing with a global megacorporation with a proven track record of illicitly stamping out anything that even almost threatened it. > What is being proposed is that if you want it to run Microsoft apps then > countries can pay an extra $10. This gives *them* a handycap in the game > and makes it that much easier for us. A "handicap" which microsoft can spin into huge savings and cheap vocational training to produce a generation of Visual Basic coders and outsourced Office support drones. Sorry, but that's what happened in all of Microsoft's other "outreach" zones. > I agree. Let's start a dialog with Ubuntu! Mark Shuttleworth has mentioned > OLPC favorably on this blog a few times, and much of the community has been > interested in getting Ubuntu running on the XO. There is a need for a full > desktop as well as a sugar UI for these machines. I run Debian on my XO > personally and I would love to have a fast Xubuntu going on it. I am a million percent behind this and I will do whatever I can to help you with this idea. > But I do know that Quanta isn't going to let OLPC open source the hardware > schematics that they own until sale volumes are much higher. Quanta isn't going to release anything ever. Just like Marvell. -- # Kurt H Maier _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
