14 DAY TRIAL // The Australian OLPC office has no plan of joining mother company's intentions of switching to Windows XP. According to a news report published by tech website ITWire, two of the five OLPC Australia executives are active members in the local Linux community.
Both board director Jeff Waugh and his partner Pia Waugh played a key role in spreading Linux across the Australian continent and are somehow resilient to Negroponte's attempts at implementing Microsoft's operating system in the XO sub-notebooks.
The report claims that the OLPC has a political part, given the fact that its low-cost notebooks are mainly ordered by different governments in the developing countries. However, Negroponte's decision to ditch the Fedora-based Sugar interface for Windows XP triggered a wave of complaints from both the community and the OLPC staff itself.
Australia is anything but a developing country and OLPC's main role here is to promote the XO notebooks on the educational market; Waugh claims that the initiative is focused on delivering an educational tool, and not a new laptop model.
"In terms of what happens here in Australia, there's primary schools and there's also communities, whether they be remote communities or things like homes for children. Then there is the Pacific as well. Part of the reason we have an organization is to support the region", Waugh claims.
Waugh also states that a Windows XP-based XO notebook is out of discussion on the Australian market, because one of the organization's core values is building on the open-source platform.
"The community built around the project influenced not only the technology but also the content and the use of the device. There is a community angle that permeates everything on what the device, how it works for kids and that sort of stuff", Waugh continued.
According to the Australian executive, Windows XP has no relevance to the project itself and its introduction in Asustek's Eee PC does not mean that any UMPC is to be running it.