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Searchhi, Is anyone here familiar with the OLPC project? I've searched and found some topics, so I'm posting this to know any one experienced with the project before. For a long time, the project wanted Windows on the XO through Microsoft's involvement, and I'm asking for the sake of freedom, what can we do to stop this from getting here.
"When I went to Egypt for the first time, I met separately with the minister of communications, minister of education, minister of science and technology, and the prime minister, and each one of them, within the first three sentences, said, 'Can you run Windows?'" Negroponte OLPC organization founder says.Source
Egypt is quoted as an example of a country that doesn't want Free Software[1] , but wants windows. For example here
But isn't acceptance the most important issue? Yes, Egypt thinks XO should run Windows. It thinks so because government officials are habitual to it. But the children of Egypt are not. If they don't accept it today, tomorrow definitely they will when OLPC will prove by the great experience of countries who have accepted it today.
This quote is very annoying, it'll be quoted everywhere. Besides that it hurts our children, it will also be used as an excuse for XO not to care about GNU/Linux and Free Software.
This directly involves our community. So, my question now... what to do about it?
[1] Although this might not be true, they may just be asking for windows because they're familiar with it, and not caring about real goals and educational long-term achievements.
I know some people from
I know some people from opencraft are involved in the OLPC work, dunno if anyone else is.
OLPCs insistence on selling at the scale of millions and to governments only is among it's weakest points. we attended the first presentation of OLPC in cairo and the Egyptian government's reaction was worse than what the articles u link to convey
I remember clearly that the first question asked by a senior employee of the MCIT was "what does microsoft think of this?"
without delving too much into politics or making accusations let's just say that the Egyptian government considers microsoft not only as a primary vendor but as a partner and ally and is unlikely to sink alot of money in any ICT program that excludes microsoft (is in fact unlikely to commit to any program without consulting microsoft).
the 2nd question asked was how to finance this purchase, again OLPC is missing how governments work in our part of the world. these kind of programs in egypt are always done through aid, corporate sponsorship or some other form of foreign funding, don't expect the ministery of education to come up with a 100 million dollars out of it's own budget.
egypt will buy XO laptops when they are sanctioned and at least partially financed by microsoft. and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
cheers,
Alaa
husband of the Grand Waragi Master
http://www.manalaa.net
thanks for your reply,
thanks for your reply, so... I guess it's OLPC's decision now to determine the goal, as a laptop project.. or an educational project !!!