Negroponte: Windows key to OLPC philosophy
While the news that Microsoft is developing a version of Windows for the so-called "$100 laptop" has caused some consternation, One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte has said the project could not promote openness if it blocked Windows.
Context & Ripple Effects
The reversal here is the story. In May 2007 the project publicly stated it had no plans for Windows support, and weeks later Negroponte and Microsoft were trading barbs in what the BBC called a war of words over the $100 laptop's direction. Now Microsoft is confirmed to be developing a Windows version for the XO, and Negroponte has flipped from antagonist to defender, arguing the project could not credibly promote openness while blocking a dominant platform.
The timing matters because demand is arriving: syndicated coverage the same week reports Uruguay buying the first $100 laptops, making software identity on the machine a live procurement question rather than a philosophical one. It also marks a shift in Microsoft's own playbook — its earlier stated approach to connecting the poor ran through cellphones, per its 2006 plan reported by the New York Times, whereas it is now competing for the laptop itself.
First-order effects
- OLPC's Linux-and-Sugar identity becomes officially optional: the XO moves toward dual-platform territory, and the open-source contributors who built Sugar must now share the machine they defined.
- Negroponte absorbs direct criticism from his own base — the confirmed consternation lands on the chairman personally, at the moment the first national order (Uruguay) makes the software question commercially concrete.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft gains a subsidized distribution channel into emerging-market classrooms that it had effectively conceded when it framed phones, not laptops, as the vehicle for getting the poor online in 2006.
- Every rival low-cost education laptop now faces an apples-to-apples Windows comparison, forcing competitors to justify their platforms on cost and fit rather than on Windows' absence.
Third-order effects
- If 'openness' comes to mean platform neutrality rather than exclusively free software, education-technology procurement becomes contested ground where governments choose stacks instead of inheriting one — a template other one-laptop-per-child-style programs will be judged against.
- The episode hardens a pattern in which mission-driven open projects survive scale-up by admitting incumbents, testing whether the founding community stays or forks away.
The trend: Development-sector hardware is becoming a battleground where 'openness' is being redefined from exclusive free software to neutral access for any platform, with incumbent vendors following the users.