Title is in error. The article is about RMS refusing to use his OLPC since it is capable of running Windows. He has switched to an inferior machine with a MIPS processor that won't have this flaw.
i don't think that's fairly representing his case. he stopped using his olpc because he feels that the project has lost sight of its original goals, and that they are now doing more harm than good. if he continues to use an olpc, he feels that it appears he supports what they're doing, when clearly he does not.
i don't agree with a lot of rms' ideals. he's far too dogmatic, which has driven away a lot of would-be supporters. but i have to admire the guy anyway. it's very rare to find someone who believes in things as strongly as rms does, and is willing to go so far out of his way to practice what he preaches.
The problem isn't that the project lost sight of its original goals. It sounds more like the goal of this project wasn't clear between groups.
Stallman stated that "the plans aimed for low cost, enabling many children to use the machines, and free software, so they would have freedom while using them." From what I understood, the goal of the project was to get computers into the hands of children in third-world countries, so they could simply get experience with computers -- period. It was my belief that the fact that free software was used was simply out of convenience; since free software was also free (as in beer), it was another step in cutting the costs of the laptop.
When Microsoft stepped in and "offered up" its OS at the extremely cut costs, Negroponte decided that would be a more useful option; I don't think his intention is to force-feed proprietary software to children. Either he believes Windows is a better option, or he is an economically self-serving individual. Regardless, I sense that the ultimate purpose of this project was unclear to certain people.
On a less direct note, I can't stand Stallman's zealotry. It's great that he is able to stand so firm on one particular point, but it is also a terrible trait, considering that he isn't willing to even give a moments consideration to alternative options on a scope/level _outside_ his "cause."
It obviously is true that there is confusion about the project's goals, but the confusion is not a simple matter of Stallman's passion coloring his perception. Even today, vestiges of an ambition and commitment far beyond delivering machines to children remain on the OLPC site.
"XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital." --- http://laptop.org/vision/mission/
"Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms. [...] we do not want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to modify their machines." --- http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/software/
This is his curse: and many people reproach him this.
His standard reply is, that if he would have ever given way to "compromises" by being less "dogmatic", GNU/Linux would have never happened: it would be infested with proprietary blobs all the way through giving control to others, rather than you, the proprietor, to the detriment of your freedom. Maybe I am wrong, but I tend to agree, if you compare the popularity of GNU/Linux vs. any other Unix, notably the FreeBSD and its variants.
Finally, I like the door knob analogy of Jeremy Allison:
to which e.g. Mark Shuttleworth would also subscribe: this is the only reason for the popularity and explosive growth of Ubuntu. The day this changes (like it did for say RedHat), it will also decline in popularity (completely different than material profit of stakeholders), something a few people already start seeing signs of.
rms has a lot of geek cred due to emacs, gcc, etc. if he'd spent that cred wisely, i think it's reasonable to assume he could have gotten a lot of other programmers to do his bidding, and gnu hurd would now be the kernel of choice, rather than linux.
Extremists are rare? Changing your everyday life for your beliefs? Judging by the media that's quite common.
Protest marches, animal testing lab attacks, anti-abortion marches, religious pilgrimages, cultish mass suicide so aliens can save you, contributing hours of work to open source software because you believe in it, charity/volunteer workers, the extra religious (nuns, monks, priests, rabbis, imams, and similar in every religion), people who started businesses because they believe in a product or lifestyle, people who blog to evangelise a lifestyle or dietary choice, bodybuilders and exercise fanatics, people who travel around the world to see one particular sports team play, people who travel to see The Sound of Music over and over again because they believe it's the best entertainment...
it's the outliers who wind up in the news, almost by definition.
and it's not just his beliefs that make rms admirable. he started the gcc project, for example. i think you could make a pretty good case that gcc is the most important software project of all time.
RMS has written an enormous amount of code. Even if you ignore RMS the ideologue, RMS the hacker certainly gets a spot in the geek hall of fame for the mountain of code that he's written in a pretty wide variety of areas. Every single project that I've worked on in the last decade has in one way or another depended on tools that he did the first versions of.
A designer of the longsoon chip came to make a presentation -- and he gave it from such a netbook using OpenOffice.org. The MIPS chip is supposed to scale (the manufacturing is a joint venture with some Italians). They are building the next Chinese HPCs out of them...
As a bonus, Windows does not run on the MIPS processor; it never has.
Actually, it is promised to have hardware support for boosting Qemu x86.
With all sympathy, it seems to me that a PC that is capable of running Linux AND Windows is more free than a PC that is only capable of running Linux.
I understand the concern of making Windows available to children, but in the end, it is better than no PC at all.
At least if you have a OLPC with Windows installed, hopefully you can find a Website that tells you how to install Linux on it. If you have no OLPC, you can not even install Linux on it.
it seems to me that a PC that is capable of running Linux AND Windows is more free than a PC that is only capable of running Linux
That's like saying a society where some people are free and some people are slaves is more free than a society where everyone is free.
I understand the concern of making Windows available to children, but in the end, it is better than no PC at all.
If it was a choice between a PC running Windows or no PC at all, ever for the rest of someone's life, then I'd agree. But as Stallman says "Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco."
In fact, why not dig deeper. Is the CPU Open Source? Why is it not a problem to use proprietary hardware?
Actually, Windows does not even have that much of a lock-in, or does it? The lock in used to stem from MS Office, and even that is not so severe anymore these days.
And I think for those children it was a question between no PC or a Windows PC. If for whatever reason the government or whoever pays for the PCs says so, what do you want to do against it?
Is the CPU Open Source? Why is it not a problem to use proprietary hardware?
Open Source processor designs exist. It wouldn't surprise me if in future FLOSS operating systems run on them.
I don't consider proprietary CPUs to be a big problem -- though they would be if they were running some sort of Treacherous Computing system or DRM which meant they wouldn't do what the user wanted.
Windows does not even have that much of a lock-in, or does it?
The lock-in is vastly less than what it used to be. I can develop web applications using a GNU/Linux system with no problems.
If for whatever reason the government or whoever pays for the PCs says so, what do you want to do against it?
It's not for me to tell foreigners how to run their countries (it's not my country). Though IMO if they make themselves dependent on Microsoft, they are not acting in their own best interests.
The end of this article contains a few more details on Richard Stallman's new choice of laptop.
It is slightly ironic that the world's first "free" (by Richard Stallman's definition) laptop is produced by China -- a country notorious for cracking down on human rights. I guess it's the difference between freedom of speech and freedom of "intellectual propety".
Unfortunately, it doesn't have a suspend-and-resume capability, which Stallman called "somewhat inconvenient." Nor does the battery charge while it's running, which he called "an annoyance."
I'm surprised to read that Mr Freedom of Choice himself is in favour of computers that can't run Windows.
(As if Microsoft wouldn't port Windows to MIPS if it became a large market oh wait Windows CE runs on MIPS devices and Windows NT 3.1 and Windows NT4 ran on MIPS (- wikipedia)).
I agree; his concerns are baseless. Any hardware that is free enough to run Free software can be made to run proprietary software. Stallman would like to remove the user's freedom to restrict freedom on hardware -- the hardware analogue of GPL vs. BSD -- but this doesn't work on hardware because copyright doesn't apply, so the best he can do is choose a platform that is merely inconvenient for some proprietary software.
Moreover, OLPC continues work on its Linux software, which is still the preferred distribution. The next wave of Give-One-Get-One machines are shipping with Linux, not Windows. And if Stallman's MIPS machines ever take off, the best educational Linux distribution for them may well be the OLPC's software, so helping OLPC (or, at least, SugarLabs) is not a waste of time or money.
The reason Negroponte is so eager to help Windows onto the device is likely because several countries expressed interest in it, and he wants to boost sales. Urging these countries to instead purchase laptops that are not compatible with Windows is not a feasible strategy; if they wanted Linux, they would not have requested Windows.
"Windows Vista has features to spy on the user, restrict use of data in the machine, and even attack the user (Microsoft can forcibly install changes in the system at any time)."
People take this guy seriously even after spewing idiocies like that? Sorry, Vista isn't 'attacking' me.
All I can picture are some very confused little Peruvian children wondering why the large scary bearded man is yelling about computadora libre.