Great headline.

"as if impoverished children don't already suffer enough"

Amen! But at least they're not giving the kids the unsold Windows ME discs that must be warehoused somewhere.

So, I guess even the thought of Linux being run on subsidized laptops for poor third-world children keeps Steve Ballmer up at night in a cold sweat.

I'm sorry .. but OLPC needs to tell MS to fuck off

Stop bashing our friends in Redmond. It's just a shame that they didn't spend a "nontrivial" amount of money to optimize a version of Windows XP for their actual *customers*.

Remember... we are all Microsoft's beta testers.
And we're paying for the privilege.

At least they're not trying to put Vista on the damned thing.

It would have to be an open source version of the project to keep the cost down. That's why Linux was being used in the first place.

@Optimistic Prime: No, it would just need to be free. Open source only affects cost because it is free, if MS "donates" this to OLPC then it doesn't change the price. MS would also get a gigantic tax write-off. Although I can't imagine them being able to strip down XP and make it as clean as stripped down *nix OS would be. If they can I doubt they could still call it XP

"Embrace & Extend" (or Embrace & Destroy). MS did the same w/ Java (back when it was kewl). Intwine itself around a completing product, then nullify it's core advantage (write-once, run anywhere, in Java's case, secure, leanly functional computing at a pittance for OLPC's case).

Want to bet that, once Win has displaced the unix version for the laptops, they'll either stop supporting it (letting it whither on the vine) or charge upgrades if the impoverished children want to get their laptop free of viruses (or hell, remotely working again, from what I know of Windows).

Why OLPC is being suckered into getting into bed w/ MS, when Redmond is so clearly threatened by a viable OLPC platform is beyond me. Political pressure, perhaps?