Mandriva's Open Letter To Steve Ballmer 357
An anonymous reader writes "An entry on the Mandriva Blog, written by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon, says that the Nigerian government, after ordering thousands of Classmate PCs with Mandriva Linux installed, has suddenly decided that they will instead install Windows. They will pay for the pre-loaded Mandriva Linux on the low-cost computing devices intended for children in the developing world, but immmediately replace the OS. The blog doesn't quite use the 'B' word but does suggest that this was not a decision that the Nigerian government made on its own."
excuse my stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:excuse my stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel & Microsoft Vs OLPC (Score:5, Interesting)
What's really strange is I can't find anything on this from Microsoft or Intel. You're providing 150,000 laptops at only $200 each to a developing nation for the purposes of education and you don't have a press release outside of that country? Maybe they're just being humble? Or maybe someone was leveraging their ex-boss's many donations to African medicine & development [gatesfoundation.org] to convince the Libyan government to take a different route?
You know, it's great that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is donating all that money to research and aide but if word gets out that they're using that to influence who those countries do business with, I don't think anyone's going to be impressed anymore. There's something fishy going on here, I'll bet you start to see many more countries make the switch to Classmate PCs over OLPCs
Get the war drums pounding! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure Microsoft had something to do with their decision, but *maybe* it simply came down to convincing Nigeria that its product was better. It sounds like they are giving Windows out for free, that may have impressed the Nigerian government, and does not constitute bribery.
Re:Intel & Microsoft Vs OLPC (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Way to go! (Score:3, Interesting)
He'd even get bonus points for getting round the EULA by hinting heavily enough that it really ought to be illegal under Nigerian law.
Re:Way to go! (Score:3, Interesting)
So march the Developers of war (Score:3, Interesting)
We should stop waiting around for others to do our work for us and stand on our own merits. Let me give an example.
We are closer to an Exchange solution than everyone thinks. If eGroupware and Kontact supported Kerberos over XML-RPC, Exchange would be finished. eGroupware and Kontact replicate all the features of Exchange and has a technologically superior advantage of funneling everything over HTTP. But it doesn't support Kerberos so it becomes a total nuisense to configure. The fact that Evolution does not support XMLRPC at all is just insane.
On the Open Office Front. Continue to support ODF, if changes need to be made to ODF to support more features, extend the features. Create versions of ODF backward and foreward compatible. And do whatever it takes to reverse engineer OOXML so that OO.org can read them, and resave them as ODF. Lets start really getting serious and making the bastards pay.
When everyone asks for the same deal ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Further businesses too will realize their negotiating power with MSFT will increase if they could bluff that they are switching to Linux. Again if MSFT calls their bluff and they could not switch, then they would be a deeper hole. So at least a few businesses would realize that the best way to negotiate a deal with MSFT is to reduce their switching cost to Linux as low as possible. Those companies will eschew deep ties and multiple levels of dependency on MSFT tools. This is how monopolies crack in free markets. Illegal acts by the monopolists can prolong, sometime by very long time, the cracks. But if the monopoly the Church had over the affairs of Europe for 1000 years cracked, why not MSFT's control over businesses for just 2 decades?
Offshoring (Score:3, Interesting)
Nigeria is one of the few countries in Africa where the economy is not a complete basket case. These countries (particularly South Africa, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria) are currently setting up call centres and have stated long term goals to become off-shoring destinations. While there is some off-shoring in the open source world there is a huge market for off-shoring in the Microsoft world. Perhaps the government of Nigeria is looking at that market and thinking that they could take a chunk of India's off-shoring revenue in a few years. If so, training their people to use Windows machines instead of Linux could be considered an investment in the future.
some reasons to keep linux... dual boot ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, I've read the letter. (Score:3, Interesting)
Good thing François didn't actually call names because that would have been slander (please excuse my English Legalese if I used the wrong term).
Now if I would be Steve, and almost be called names based on nothing but assumptions after winning a round fairly, I don't think I would care much. The taste of victory would just be too strong.
If I *would* have bribed someone, I'd probably care even less. The letter doesn't tell me anything I don't already know.
If I would be Steve, had bribed someone and someone could prove it- Now that might make make me throw around a chair or two.
Re:What was the purpose of the OLPC project again (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither, the point of OLPC was to provide hardware, software, and content support for a particular model of education around which the XO's hardware and software and associated content have been developed. Openness, in the OSS sense, supports both flexibility for the user of the system and the model of education that the OLPC is centered around (though it is neither strictly necessary to nor sufficient for that model.)
The Classmates with Mandriva that Nigeria purchased were not from OLPC, and arguably are less well suited to that model (perhaps because Nigeria had a different educational model in mind), and switching them to Windows makes them even less suited to the model the OLPC project is centered around. OTOH, if it doesn't work out, it will be cheaper to replace Mandriva -- and possibly even a build of the OLPC software stack with slight customization to address the different hardware -- than to replace the laptops with new laptops, though it would be a major headache.
The "supposed benefits" OLPC laptops are intended to deliver are not entirely independent of the software, as you suggest here. However, the OLPC project and laptops aren't more than tangentially relevant to this discussion anyway.
The Mandriva sale has nothing to do with the OLPC project. The OLPC laptops are not Classmates, and they aren't sold with Mandriva, but with a customized version of Fedora with Sugar. The letter from Mandriva might suggest that the entire point of the Mandriva effort in Nigeria was to promote their software and increase its exposure, which would make sense. It might also be the point of the letter to draw attention to possible corruption in the government of Nigeria.
And...so, what? If there is an appearance of corruption in a move such as that, whether it favors Microsoft of some competitor, why shouldn't their be a complaint?
First, the OLPC project has little to do with this, since the Intel Classmate hardware effort and Mandriva and Microsoft's software efforts in the developing world are all alternatives to the OLPC's hardware/software stack, and none of them are part of the OLPC project.
Second, people who are interesting in helping people are always promoting their own beliefs in doing so, and often have strong beliefs about what are the best ways to help people. Those aren't competing goals as you suggest; they are goals that are always interlinked.