The current situation
On May 15 Microsoft formally announced that Windows XP will be made available for the XO-Laptop.
Not surprisingly the open-source community involved with OLPC was less than thrilled about this announcement.
Walter Bender, former President of OLPC Software and Content, resigned his post at OLPC and founded a new organization called "Sugar Labs", which is dedicated to further extend the open-source software developed for OLPC.
This obviously raises the question of OLPC Austria's position regarding this situation.
Our thoughts on OLPC, Microsoft and Sugar Labs
OLPC.at remains dedicated to the core matters at hand: developing open technologies, platforms, software and content to be used as educational tools mainly for, but not limited to, developing countries.
In general we consider the work and efforts which have gone into Sugar an excellent basis for all future developments, especially since the software already works on various hardware platforms such as the Classmate PC and Asus eee PC. It is also expected for the software to be adapted to support even more devices in the future. We are in close contact with Walter Bender, the "Sugar Labs" team and other stakeholders and will continue the current practice of coordinating our course of action with them.
Since we are committed to supporting the best digital educational tools we are relatively unperturbed regarding a Windows version for the XO-laptop. The GNU/Linux based open-source "Sugar" platform is a technology that has the potential to revolutionize how children around the globe can learn and be taught. It is therefore a significantly more interesting educational tool than a Windows XP version that is both limited in functionality and liberties granted by its license.
