Sec: Unclassified - Pitch Ubuntu at $100 wind up laptop?

<quote who="Marius Bock" date="Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 12:33:59PM +0200">
> As far as I know it was decided to ship it with Red Hat -- probably
> some incarnation of Fedora. That is after they said no to the free
> offer from Apple for Mac OS X.

This is not exactly an accurate accounting of the situation.

It's not entirely clear what the software stack will be on the laptop
yet when it ships or how much say in the software the countries that
buy these laptops will choose to have. If China wants tens of millions
and wants to install some sort of RedFlag4Kids distro, I'm not sure
anyone is going to tell them they can't.

IMHO, the most difficult and interesting problems in terms of software
are in making a system that is useful for very young children from a
wide diversity of backgrounds -- perhaps even kids that don't
read. I'm not sure the chose of distribution really has much of an
impact on solving this problem and no current distro (including Fedora
or RHEL) does this well.

Of course, Red Hat is a OLPC partner organization and is involved in
trying to solve these problems. It very well may pull from some
existing Red Hat tools and technologies to solve appropriate
problems. Other non-RH people are also involved including myself. 

Of course, any software stack will be 100% free software and we hope
and expect to see (and perhaps build) other ways of approaching the
problem.

Regards,
Mako


-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako at ubuntu.com
http://mako.cc

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so
far as society is free to use the results. --RMS