There's a post on Slashdot about an open letter to Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, from François Bancilhon of Mandriva. At stake is the issue of the Nigerian government agreeing to purchase Intel's Classmate PC (one of the competitors of the OLPC) with Mandriva Linux installed, but later to be re-flashed with Windows. The letter is a simplistic finger pointer at Steve Ballmer for messing up the work put in by Mandriva. You can read the letter here.

 
I am glad the machines have shipped. We will get to see some of its success (and failures). Its a bit of a tragedy though, that the machines will swap a free and open source platform for a non-free and much encumbered one. However, the logic of ownership supersedes the FOSS sentiment. Once the Nigerians buy it, its theirs. They can do whatever they want to do with it.

In a bigger picture though, the Classmate PC with Mandriva or Windows does not address teaching or learning as effectively as the OLPC does. Classmate PC is still only a tool - a laptop for grown-ups, shrunk to a smaller size for kids. OLPC's constructivism-driven approach on the other hand makes a lot more sense. Watching a [two-year old] child grow up in my own home has made me revisit Jean Piaget's thinking and the importance of Constructivist learning. For instance, I am amazed at how she has figured out how to put on her shoes. We didn't teach her how to do so. She just figured it out by trying to wear them a few different ways! (As a sidenote, take a look at this article on Constructivist learning written by Maggie Beers, our director of Academic Technology.)

Mandriva (and for that matter most other distros of Linux) and Windows still use the application-focused approach. Sure the Nigerian kids are going to have a computer, and they will learn to use Microsoft Word or Abiword, but will it improve learning? I doubt it. Priorities are all driven by market share; there is a lot of focus on the method, but little on education. As long as all machines boot into Windows or Linux, we seem to be satisfied. What about the society's bottom line?