14 DAY TRIAL // Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child charity organization is strolling towards replacing its currently existing Linux-based Sugar operating system with Microsoft's Windows XP. Negroponte's concern towards Microsoft has triggered a wave of complaints from the company's employees that topped with Walter Bender's resignation.
However, the company's CEO still considers that the partnership with Microsoft is the best strategy to boost sales. At the moment, the tiny XO sub-notebooks are running on a Linux-based Fedora operating system, with an OLPC custom-built interface called Sugar. The interface is aimed at giving children intuitive and facile control over the machine.
Although internal sources claim that Negroponte wants to completely wash his hands off Sugar and jump in Microsoft's bandwagon, the company's CEO claimed in an e-mail that he only wants to boost the interface, not to replace it.
"Sugar needs to be disentangled. I keep using the omelette analogy, claiming it needs to be a fried egg, with distinct yoke and white, rather than having the UI, collaborative tools, power management and radios merge into one amorphous blob," he claimed. "Otherwise, it is impossible to debug and will be limited to the small, albeit growing, world of the XO hardware platform," he continued.
It is unclear at the moment whether Negroponte wants to re-design the interface in such a manner to run on multiple Linux flavors or to port it on Microsoft's Windows XP operating system as an alternative application.
"Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms and to run under Windows. We have been engaged in discussions with Microsoft for several months, to explore a dual boot version of the XO," Negroponte continued. "Some of you have seen what Microsoft developed on their own for the XO. It works well and now needs Sugar on top of it (so to speak)," he concluded.
OLPC's CEO also claims that there are multiple advantages in switching to Windows, and he even named the Flash example, a widely used technology in education, that is not supported by Sugar. However, according to Negroponte, a dual-boot version of the XO, running Fedora/Sugar and XP is already in the works.