Software Free

Thanks to Justin for brining this to my notice:
http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi

The very first comment by Ben Shwartz clears up most of the confusion.

But I feel tempted to comment on a few of Ivan’s observations.

## In this issue
* Free Software Supporter exclusive: WBUR is streaming Ogg Vorbis!
* DBD Action Alert - Libraries: Eliminate DRM!
* Get DeltaH, gNewSense 2.0
* Get your next machine with gNewSense
* Silicon Mechanics to ship servers with free BIOS preinstalled
* Can we rescue OLPC from Windows? by Richard M. Stallman
* End Software Patents: the Bilski hearing, heard.

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"Skype fought the GPL and the GPL won. The OLPC XO project abandons free software just as RMS switches to an XO; RMS not happy. New monthly newsletters from the FSF and FSFE. GNOME and KDE want to have a joint development conference in 2009. GNOME and GCC conferences coming up later this year. Plus all the usual news: more GPL v3 conversions, HURD news, GNOME news, GCC news, and more..."

Has the mission of OLPC changed so much? I say it has. No longer are the five core principals initially employed when the project started valid. The original Five Core Principles were:

Richard Stallman just switched to an OLPC XO, for the free bios, and at that same moment in time, Nicholas Negroponte made some odd statements about Windows and the OLPC.

"I read Negroponte's statement presenting the OLPC XO as a platform for Windows in the most ironic circumstances possible: during a week of preparing, under a deadline, to migrate personally to an XO. I made this decision for one specific reason: freedom..."

...and Matthew Aslett is dead-on:

“One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist,” Negroponte told the AP, while lamenting that the focus on open source software had caused technical problems, such as limiting support for Flash. “Negroponte said he was mainly concerned with putting as many laptops as possible in children’s hands,” added the AP.

The focus on laptop sales is laudable, but it is debatable whether it justifies abandoning open source software. This is a matter not of fundamentalism, but of principles.

Sad, but the prospect of Sugar running on other low-cost GNU/Linux laptops almost makes up for it.

Caffeinated eyes, fatigued body and loads of work is not only recollection from our first ever XO deployment. The best part is how we enjoyed every moment, I just never want to forget all the moment we shared, those jokes, pranks, lighter moments and joy. I am trying to remember as much moments as I can from this marvelous event we orchestrated together.

Who's Hungry:
On the event night, Shankar wanted to have fruits only for dinner, Prakash wanted rice badly and I was starving for heavy dinner, jwalanta and Nirmal were searching food for us desperately and at 11pm night we couldn't find any fastfood or restaurant to have something, my patience was about to break when jwalanta called me and informed one kitchen was open, even though we have to pay twice or thrice the normal price we were happy to see the face of food at midnight.
This is where you start sharing

Yesterday, 27th of March, 2008 was the BIG day for us. In coordination with Department of Education, Ministry of Education, we distributed Mero Sanu Sathi, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Laptop, to the students of 4th graders of Janajyoti Ni Ma Vi, Ugratara-8, Janagal, Kavre as a part of first ever pilot distribution of the laptop in Nepal, codenamed “Sunrise”. The laptops were distributed amidst a program chaired by Purna Bahadur Khatri, Chairman of School Management Committee. The officials from Department of Education, Nepal Government were also present in the distribution ceremony.

Sunrise of the day as seen from OLPC Development Lab, Kathmandu.

Janajyoti Lower Secondary School, Ugratara-8, Janagal, Kavre - the Department of Education, Ministry of Education had already provided us the name of school where it'd be best to do a pilot. But the real work began as we received 25 B4 XOs sent in by OLPC International. It was almost at the beginning of the month, but we decided to keep the news little low. Afterall it was just a pilot and not a major distribution. All we wanted was to make it work rather than have big publicity. However, all the active volunteers knew about this and we had the news quite goin in our IRC too.

School's Principal Narayan Prasad Mahaju

A post about Drupal on the XO over on the Development Seed blog reminded me about a HOWTO and video demo I put together over a month ago and then got too busy to post. The Drupal on OLPC HOWTO is over on the OLPC wiki, and uses Lighttpd and MySQL for the stack.

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Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of both the MIT Media Lab and the non-profit One Laptop Per Child, delivered the last keynote speech of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting tonight.

FROM his hot, dusty, locust-plagued property in the NSW outback, a software engineer who goes by the name Quozl is doing his bit to help educate 1.5 billion of the world's poorest children.

I finally managed to get a child in front of the XO PC from the One Laptop Per Child project. I thought I would share my observations from watching her interact with this interesting tool.

Director OLPC Europe, Middle East and Asia Matt Keller, in an interview with The Sunday Times FT, said the World Bank has stepped into fund a pilot project to introduce laptops as an educational tool in nine provinces in the island.