I hope I'm not echoing someone else's sentiments verbatim, but, I've been a developer since my grandparents got suckered into paying 286 prices for an IBM 8088 in 1991 (I think I was 14). As I got older, I heard the old sysadmins evangelizing unix in college when a 20MHz workstation was $5000 and a 66MHz PC was $1500. All the noise between MS and Unix got me to form an opinion, (which it the point I'm getting around to) namely:
Microsoft is King Of The Hill because of (1)Visual Basic (2)MSDN, and (3) the $1500 PC. Namely, planets aligned to increase the number of developers by maybe 1000 times in a short while by (1) Lowering the learning curve for making something useful (VB Tool), (2) Making documentation ubiquitous and unified (MSDN), and (3) Hardware was suddenly reasonably easy to lay hands on. One week ago I knew squat about Linux, now, I could appreciably help a student (namely mine) make her XO "do something", and I'm about to contribute a quick report on running Sugar on top of XFCE4 (yes, it works great, plus alt-tab works). If we didn't have one this wouldn't be the case. I'm not going to get particularly ecxited about running an XO emulator on my PC and start adding to the wiki, or writing apps; not without my own 'toy' - basic human nature. I'd say G1G1 is pretty much essential by my philosophy - look at wikipedia compared to other online encyclopedias. Besides, mixing 'gift for me, gift for charity' is a killer marketing move if nothing else - hopefully the G1G1 numbers speak to that...if it was up to me, I'd get Newegg.com and Thinkgeek.com to become resellers for G1G1. Why ever stop it? I'll bet G1G1 would hold it's own indefinitely against Asus eePC (sp?), etc, if it was as well publicized. I don't mean it would necessarily outsell a giant manufacturer, but I'll bet it would keep the doors open at OLPC, and keep some core developers paid to make apps that really uphold the OLPC philosophy - like PBS for TV. There is more to life than commerce, and other than being a geek, that's why I did G1G1 on the first day. That's why my folks bought a Prius even though they never commute. Steve Tucson, AZ, USA _______________________________________________ Olpc-open mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open
