Richard Stallman Slams OLPC for Switching to Windows
Free software advocate Richard M. Stallman, once a devotee of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project, has written a scathing criticism of the group in response to the reversal of its policy of only using free software.
As the OLPC project prepares to begin shipping its laptops to underdeveloped countries en masse, Negroponte announced newer revisions of the OLPC XO Children’s Machine will be redesigned to run Windows. Not surprisingly, RMS sees this as a profoundly negative development, adding, “the world would be better off if the OLPC project had never existed.”
Thus opines RMS in Boston Review:
Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco -— in a world where only one company sells tobacco. Like any addictive drug, it inculcates a harmful dependency. (Bill Gates made this comparison in a 1998 issue of Fortune Magazine.) No wonder Microsoft offers the first dose to children at a low price. Microsoft aims to teach poor children this dependency so they can smoke Windows for their whole lives. I don’t think governments or schools should support that aim.
Only some of the machines, such as those to be delivered to Peru, will come with Windows pre-installed. The rest will still ship with the OLPC’s customized Sugar OS, a free, Linux-based operating system.
“But even the OLPCs delivered with GNU/Linux will be easy to convert subsequently to Windows,” Stallman says. “It only requires a small card that is supposed to cost $7. (I expect Microsoft will hand these out to the kiddies like free samples of cigarettes.)”
Stallman was initially a supporter of the OLPC Project. He took issue with the machine’s commercial BIOS and its use of a non-free driver for its wireless hardware. But a few modifications and a few deleted files later, he saw a usable and promising machine, a free software success story. He praised it in speeches, showing it off on stage. Those days are over.
So what is RMS using now? He says he is preparing to switch to a new machine from Lemote, a Chinese company which makes a MIPS-based laptop containing only free software.
And he’s not worried about Lemote switching to Microsoft any time soon.
“Windows does not run on the MIPS processor,” he says. “It never has.”
[Thanks to Boston Review’s Katie Koch for the tip]
