American Samizdat

Thursday, December 11, 2008. *
Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco.



Not Free at Any Price
Why I switched to the OLPC—and why I dropped it Richard M. Stallman

The One Laptop Per Child project, launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, was supposed to lead millions of children around the world to information technology and freedom. The plans aimed for low cost, enabling many children to use the machines, and free software, so they would have freedom while using them. I thought it was a good idea; I even planned to use one myself when I found in the OLPC’s promise of free software a way to escape the proprietary startup programs that all commercial laptops used.

But just as I was switching to an OLPC, the project backed away from its commitment to freedom and allowed the machine to become a platform for running Windows, a non-free operating system. [What makes this issue so important?] read on..


proprietary software sucks ass, I try to use 'open source' wherever possible, which is becoming less and less due to the control issues.
posted by Uncle $cam at 5:42 AM
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