The £7 Laptop?

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Permalink Reply by Liz on February 7, 2009 at 20:55

Whoops, it seems that the £7 laptop might have been an exaggeration

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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on February 7, 2009 at 22:54

AS THE PRICE of physical components (the hardware) has fallen, the proportion of PC's all-up price that is represented by the Licence Fee for the operating system (also known as the Microsoft tax) has increased.

For some cheap PCs, this fee, to one of America's richest corporations, is now possibly 20% (it is difficult to put an exact figure on it as M$ incentivizes PC box assemblers towards M$ exclusivity. The more the PC assemblers eschew alternative OSs, the less M$ will charge the assembler per licence (restraint of trade, anyone? Anti-competitive or what?)

This is the rapacious background to the efforts by Professor Nicholas Negroponte and others to provide inexpensive laptops for schools in the third world, which use Open Source software for the operating system. The licence fee costs nothing. The operating system is Linux, which is a UNIX-class operating system, running on the One Laptop per Child machine.

This was all such a threat to The Beast of Redmond that that company was reported to have paid a big bribe tranche of "marketing help" to a Nigerian official to thwart the planned adoption of OLPC in a large swathe of schools in Nigeria.

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