$100 laptop unveiled at the WSIS
The much-touted cheap laptop created by Nicholas Negroponte and his team at MIT was unveiled at the UN’s WSIS today. The machine is lime green, has a wind-up crank to power it when no other power source is available, and runs open source software.
No doubt you already know all about it - now so does the rest of the world. The story was on the front page of the BBC News, Seattle Times, Bombay’s Financial Express, CNN Money and Washington Post’s websites.
MacWorld has an alternate take on the story - just why they decided on Linux rather than OSX, which Steve Jobs offered free (as in free beer):
Apple CEO Steve Jobs offered to furnish the project with free copies of Mac OS X for each machine, but the project team elected to choose open source rather than proprietary solutions.
Project co-founder and MIT professor Seymour Papert said: “We declined because it’s not open source”.
Perhaps they were after the other type of freedom - this is from the BBC’s story on the subject:
[The laptops] will rely on open-source software so that support for local content and languages can easily be built.
In other news from the summit, Tectonic claims that SA’s president Thabo Mbeki will be attempting to put OSS on the agenda:
President Mbeki told the conference yesterday: “We … believe that we should move with the necessary speed to implement the agreement to utilise various technologies and licensing models, including those developed under both proprietary schemes and open source and free modalities to expedite access to ICTs and the elimination of the digital divide by fostering collaborative development, inter-operative platforms and free and open source software.”
Dana Blakenhorn has published some thoughts on “Democracy vs. Consensus” and the lessons that can be learnt from open source over at Corante.