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.
