New President for OLPC Organization

haroldag writes "After Walter Bender's resignation as president of OLPC, Charles Kane enters to take his place as the new boss. Kane says 'The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible. Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn't matter. It's about getting it into kids' hands. Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for.'"

Re:Obligatory?

[Comboman]

Charles Foster Kane was the main character of the movie 'Citizen Kane' and 'Rosebud' is a significant quote from the film. To give any more away would be a spoiler; if you haven't seen it, please rent it. It is considered by many critics and film buffs to be the greatest American film of all time.

Re:Throwing out the baby

[Frenchy_2001]

I mean, there's no way the OLPC is going to be able to run the common Windows software packages that I'm sure the leaders think are desirable
Seriously, what is it with geeks and power? XP is 7 years old. It ran quite correctly on P3 with 256MB RAM, why would it NOT run on the OLPC? Turn down the effects and tune down the services that wont be used on this computer and you mat have a solid basis.

I agree with the rest of the comment, by selecting XP over Linux, they are giving up some of the transparency and educational value, but using technical restrictions is a straw man argument. The OLPC today is no worse than a lot of computers 7 years ago when XP came out. Wont be blazing fast, but it will work. Memory might be the restriction, not processing power.

Re:Throwing out the baby

[Bob The Cowboy]

I think the parent's point wasn't just that XP wouldn't run all that great on the hardware, but that the apps that people typically associate with windows would definitely not run well, especially not on top of XP. Think more along the lines of Office.

Re:The Price Is Right

[serviscope_minor]

It would be more honest - but less satisfying - to say that the market has met OLPC's price.

That it is - or very soon will be - possible for the OEM to build a fully competitive educational laptop, pre-load Microsoft's Student Innovation Suite and sell it for less than the XO.

Then why haven't they? The other laptops are still more expensive and have the wrong feature set. Why on earth would for-profit companies target the lucrative people with not enough money market? Remember, the OLPC effort is not a for-profit company.

You want Squeak? You can have Squeak.

What has that got to do with anything?

The Windows platform demands no ideological or religious commitment whatever.

Yes it does. It demands a commitment to NEVER be able to see the source code and find out how it works. It demands you agree to a commitment to never copy it and give it away. Perhaps it's a commitment you don't care about?

You can load and run software under any license you chose. Without ever once being drawn into a theological argument over how many angels can dance on the head of a GPL pin.

Ah, so you're Trolling! I should have guessed. Unless you're really so stupid that you believe that this is somehow not the case with Linux.