Windows

Comment to the question concerning the lately announced "strategy change": Microsoft (win XP) instead of Linux!?

If you did that, you would betray the whole free and open source software community and, even worse, your whole project and educational goals.

I would like to clearify that I am not one of those who hate Microsoft and Windows. Windows is much better in many cases (e.g. usability) than GNU/Linux --- and GNU/Linux is much better in many other cases in return. I would love to see Windows (and also OSX) run on that great machine. But: ONLY as an optional and not as a standard solution. Because, if you switched from GNU/Linux to Windows as the standard out-of-the-box OS, as it was proposed in some articles, it would be against your own educational goals like "Openness" or "that Children who get help should NOT be dependent of the so-called developed World" --- which would be the case if a non-free OS like Windows, which was developed in the US, is the standard software to run on your device.

See your own question in FAQ "What software will be used with the $100 laptop?" why a lot (!) of your own project goales cannot be reached, if you changed your strategy in that way:

[...]

We made a decision to base the OLPC on open-source software in order to provide countries (and to whatever degree appropriate, the children themselves) with the freedom to decide for themselves what to place on the machines, and to share and localize examples of best practice generated domestically and taken from abroad.

Open-source software gives children the opportunity to “own” the machine in every sense. While we don't expect every child to become a programmer, we don't want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to reach towards complexity. We are using open document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. The children—and their teachers—will have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, hardware, and content.