Nicholas Negroponte explains his position on Windows and Linux for XO

Negroponte has been fielding emails and interviews about the recent departure of Walter Bender and the state of the OLPC project. Specifically, there is fear amongst Internet technology reporters and Linux advocates that the OLPC may become a Windows only laptop.

Negroponte honed his thoughts on this subject. In an interview with pcpro, he commented on the limitations of the Sugar environment and Linux.

"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. Otherwise, it is impossible to debug and will be limited to the small, albeit growing, world of the XO hardware platform."

"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. 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)."

Sugar and applications such as Browse currently can not run under Windows. Windows applications that are not specifically designed for the memory and space limitations of the laptop will have difficulty running on the laptop. Firefox 2 can typically take 150 megabytes of ram or more while running.

In an email with the Register, Negroponte clarified his position on Sugar.

“Sugar is a very good idea, less than perfectly executed," he said. "I attribute our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices. Our mission has never changed. It has been to bring connected laptops for learning to children in the poorest and most remote locations of the world.”

“Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning model or pure open source. I believe the best educational tool is constructionism and the best software development method is open source.”

In an interview with AP news, he commented on open source.

"There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."

Negroponte said the XO will be getting a dual-boot option with Linux and Windows XP. There is no word on the added cost of Windows XP but it's estimated to add $3-$15 to the price of the laptop. The laptop is currently priced around $188.