Jonesieblog

The Eee PC is a fantastic wee device. Add a touch screen (which is apparently coming soon) and you have a viable means of delivering 1-1. What makes all the difference to the cost point of the device is the fact that you don’t have to pay for a copy of Windows xp. That would add something like 20-30% onto the cost. You don’t have to pay for Windows because the Eee pc uses Linux.
The Eee pc does not shout about its Linux operating system - it just uses it. So I’d like to shout about the hundreds of thousands of hours of work given freely by thousands of developers to create the Linux operating system and the vast range of free software that runs on it.

These people have given of their own time without any financial reward simply because they wanted to help to make something useful to humanity, or maybe because it was just an interesting problem to solve. Whatever their motivation, I am immensely grateful to them. Without them we would still be stuck with the duopoly of MS and Mac, and the Eee pc would not exist.

Linux has benefited from considerable investment by IBM and other companies over the years, but it is the vast army of unpaid volunteers that created Linux and continue to drive its growth.

Stumble it!

I was at an International Education meeting today, and as I sat listening to the speakers, it struck me that we are about to have millions of children in the developing world arriving online, via the OLPC project.

This represents an enormous opportunity to forge international links, but I haven’t heard anyone talking about it. I suspect that outside the Slashdot reading nerdosphere that I inhabit, most teachers have never even heard of OLPC.

We should be planning now, so that when these youngsters emerge online we are ready to welcome them.

Stumble it!