On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 8:07 AM, BB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That's great news! I was disappointed to see the XO Computer opt for a > Windows load. Seems that the PACK mentality is alive and well in the third > world. The Wall Street Journal had a OP-ED piece suggesting the children's > motivation was driven by the lack of cool games, at least in American > households owning the XO Computer; but then again it could be a HIT JOB to > cripple the OX Linux load.
The OLPC President resigned the day before Negroponte went public with his news and Negroponte said some fairly nasty things about the Sugar desktop environment and open sourcerers when announcing that XO was moving toward exclusive use of a special edition of WinXP. <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9079798&pageNumber=1>. He gave the example of Gnash supporting Flash only through Flash 8.0 as his example of the reason for the move and said there were still other problem areas. It's clearly not just Linux and Sugar that has Microsoft concerned. Sugar was going to ship with AbiWord as the word processor. It was the only version of AbiWord set to default to OpenDocument text (ODT) as the file save type. The AbiWord developers are rather abruptly interested in developing support for Microsoft OOXML. <http://uwog.net/news/?p=10>. AbiWord runs on Linux and on Windows and the XO requires a lightweight word processor. OpenOffice.org has a resource footprint that's too much for the XO. I suspect that Microsoft management are not oblivious to the fact that the XO strategy aims to *create* new markets in developing nations, as opposed to passively fulfilling demand as the demand evolves naturally. And thriving black markets for XO laptops will quickly evolve in the nations that distribute them to children, with a predictable price point at least initially less than a full-blown Windows-equipped x86 machine. I also know from my time in Viet Nam that freebies distributed in poverty-stricken rural areas quickly migrate to the urban areas where there is a market for them. Small businesses that can fulfill their requirements with the XO will do so. And the prospect of open source becoming the de facto standard in the urban areas of developing nations is, I suspect, what produced the biggest blip on the Microsoft management team's radar screen. One avenue of counter-attack would be for folks who did the "buy two and get one free" thing with XO to file small claims court complaints to get their money back, after first being turned down by OLPC, and to publicize their efforts to get a refund. There's a cause of action sounding in negligent misrepresentation, a tort theory, that fits the situation nicely. Evidence that OLPC negligently misrepresented that the XO would ship with Sugar isn't hard to find. From there, it's just the networking effects of having paid for an XO Sugar Island that runs in an ocean of WinXP-equipped XOs. The end user license agreement terms should prove no barrier. It's law in every state I know of that a party to a contract or license may not disclaim liability for the party's own negligence. The cost of personal service of a summons and complaint through process server services is around $35. I haven't checked what the filing costs are for small claims court in Oregon recently, but in small claims court, the loser is routinely ordered to pay the other side's "costs," a term that does not encompass attorney fees and expenses other than minor items like the cost of serving process, court filing fees, etc. So it's a low risk play. Normally, when a party from one state sues another in state court, the party sued has an automatic right to remove the case to federal court. But the maximum amount that can be recovered in small claims actions doesn't meet the jurisdictional minimum damages requirement in federal court. The amounts of damages involved in small claims court are not worth the expense of an out-of-state defendant retaining a law firm to defend the cases, so most such cases go down on a default judgment for failure to defend, without the defendant appearing in court. Any decision to fight such claims would have to be justified by a defendant on factors other than a financial cost-benefit ratio. Even if OLPC did fight them, the pragamatic worst case exposure for costs awarded to OLPC for successfully defending such a case would be far less than the cost of two XO laptops. Best regards, Marbux _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
