Unlimited long distance $24.99/moNegroponte passes the Windows "virility test"
Wow. Some things are better left unsaid, but since Nicholas Negroponte, embattled founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, said it, I'll quote it:
When I talk to people and tell them we can run Windows, they are very impressed. You pass a sort of virility test.
Until you're emasculated by ceding control of the project to Microsoft, which has a long practice of bullying the hardware vendors who carry its Windows operating system. As for being proud that he runs Windows, why? Since when has it been hard to do that? I guess if you set your sights low enough....
But then Negroponte really crams his foot in his mouth, arguing that he needed the open-source community to get started, but only to do the early heavy lifting to pave the way for Microsoft:
For us to launch the laptop, we had no choice but to use open source. We needed the community. We needed to get (in) there at the OS level to build devices and drivers...to make our point, to make the laptop.
I'm sure the open-source development community around OLPC (which Negroponte blames for its failure) loves hearing that it was being used.
Regardless, it's simply not true that open source was the only way to move forward. I'm sure Negroponte could have interested Gates and Co. in using OLPC from the beginning to seed developing markets, but OLPC made a conscious, philosophical reason for going with open source based on freedom.
Negroponte's revisionist history is false. I don't fault him for feeling like he needs to change his strategy based on the current climate for OLPC, but don't appreciate him trying to pretend that Windows was the natural end result for OLPC. It wasn't. It might be an acceptable end, but it wasn't inevitable.
Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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