[SGVLUG] ndiyo

[Terry Hancock]

matti wrote:

>"What's not smart is that someone who makes a dollar a year will spend
>a hundred dollars on something that can be stolen or broken," Anderson
>said. 
>
This is something of a false argument. It must be realized
that:

1) The "$1/yr" figure is *cash* income. Obviously, we're talking
about rural poor, who, for the most part, supply all of their own
daily needs. So in US terms, this is an "equivalent income" of at
least $15,000 or so for someone who is not a true homesteader
(which is almost everybody in the US).  This wouldn't make a
difference if they actually had to come up with $100 cash, but
they don't, because ...

2) No one on the OLPC project proposes to "sell" laptops to farmers
in Africa. They plan to sell them in quantity to the education agencies
in those countries that they have made deals with (and obviously
they hope to make more such deals).

Also, it's often suggested that this is some kind of subsidy, but it
isn't -- it's a case of developing nations paying to solve their own
problem, by taking advantage of collective bargaining and very
high-volume deals.  Quanta (the contractor) doesn't plan to make
a direct profit off of these deals, but they don't propose to lose money
on them, either -- they will provide them at or near cost, and plan to
offer similar models for commercial sale which will turn a profit.

Stealing such a thing will be pretty pointless since they will be
distributed to near-saturation in the places they are provided. Hence,
 there won't be much market for the stolen goods (and they are
less desireable outside of their target application).  Similar projects
are going to be producing PCs at not much higher price that will
compete commercially, further reducing the motivation to steal.

The fact is, what we're seeing is a new wave of commoditization of
computing -- something even more personal and inexpensive than
the PC/home-computing wave that brought us MS-DOS, Microsoft
Windows, and Apple Macintosh.  These "laptops" are internally very
much like "cell phones", they just have better keyboards and
displays.

Of course, there's more than one initiative going on, but there's
also a number of organizations that feel very threatened by this
oncoming commoditization, so you will see a lot of FUD about it
(e.g. Bill Gates' comment about the OLPC laptop being a "gadget"
that no one would be interested in).

Certainly Linux and open source software are not only of interest
to the "underprivileged developing world", but it is certainly useful
to them.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com