OLPC talk:Five principles

reading required

I have an (illiterate) 4yo and 2yo who each have an XO-1, and the laptop is not very interesting to them because of the level of reading required. More work needs to go into the UI if we really want to make it friendly to kids who have no reading. -D Risacher 2008-01-06

We are targeting 6–16. 2–4 is a bit of a stretch for many of the activities. --Walter 08:21, 7 January 2008 (EST)

Perhaps some of the GCompris activities would be more appropriate? (Screenshots here) —Joe 11:09, 7 January 2008 (EST)

Is "Free and Open Source" still a core principle?

If it is, then what are we to make of reports in ComputerWorld that the group's XO laptop may evolve to use only Windows XP as its operating system, with open-source educational applications such as the homegrown Sugar software running on top?

It is, very much so. As for the quote, that shows that you can be quoted saying a lot of things that aren't quite right. We are getting closer to having Sugar run as an interface and application suite on top of Fedora, but I don't believe that has ever been tried on Windows.

If anything, our successful experiences to date have strengthened our commitment to that principle. Windows has been independently developed to run on the XO. No deployments at scale have used Windows on an XO to date (perhaps 3000 machines in the world run Windows, compared to 1.2 million running only Sugar on Fedora.)

Please read the fifth principle closely (and check the history of the page, if you like) -- from the beginning, that core principle has been a commitment to letting children have access to a universe of both free and proprietary software. We have not made it difficult for Microsoft to develop its tools for the XO, nor have we done so for any other developer. Indeed, it is a compliment when a development house invests in developing for our hardware. So far, no major deployment has opted to use Windows.

When some of our partners and potential partners expressed an interest in trying Windows, we put some work into making sure that this would be possible without replacing Sugar -- by making Open Firmware support dual booting into more than one operating system. That was so that we could still commit to giving every OLPC school access to Sugar on Linux, whether or not they bought a license for some other operating system as well. Again, despite the misleading news stories, none of these potential non-Sugar deployments has come to pass. We are still shipping 50,000 XOs a month running a completely free-software and free-content stack with Sugar on Fedora.