I didn't know that this project was about open source, i though that it was just chosen because of its ease of use and cheap licensning fee. I though the project was about getting notebooks for all those starving etheopians or something. Should this really be such a big debate? It's the only current option out there that makes sense, well as far as I know. Uses hardware to do ad-hoc and has less power consumption, sounds cool.
I'm pretty sure OLPC was supposed to be open source so that people could use them to learn programming, with a nice library of examples to learn from.
More pragmatically, closed-source drivers in an open-source OS are a terrible idea; they always lag behind the kernel. I remember, back in 2000, at an IETF meeting, I borrowed an 802.11b card for my laptop, only to discover that the only driver available worked only with an old version of the kernel. Said version had had a security bug so serious, Red Hat had warned users not to use it on any system with a network.
However, I suspect de Raadt is mainly upset because this means BSD won't be able to run on the OLPC.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
James @ Oct 11th 2006 9:40AM
I didn't know that this project was about open source, i though that it was just chosen because of its ease of use and cheap licensning fee. I though the project was about getting notebooks for all those starving etheopians or something. Should this really be such a big debate? It's the only current option out there that makes sense, well as far as I know. Uses hardware to do ad-hoc and has less power consumption, sounds cool.
John Stracke @ Oct 11th 2006 10:46AM
I'm pretty sure OLPC was supposed to be open source so that people could use them to learn programming, with a nice library of examples to learn from.
More pragmatically, closed-source drivers in an open-source OS are a terrible idea; they always lag behind the kernel. I remember, back in 2000, at an IETF meeting, I borrowed an 802.11b card for my laptop, only to discover that the only driver available worked only with an old version of the kernel. Said version had had a security bug so serious, Red Hat had warned users not to use it on any system with a network.
However, I suspect de Raadt is mainly upset because this means BSD won't be able to run on the OLPC.