1. Child Ownership
2. Low Ages
3. Saturation
4. Connection
5. Free and Open Source

It’s important to quote what is under #5 above:

The child with an XO is not just a passive consumer of knowledge,
but an active participant in a learning community. As the children grow and pursue new ideas, the software, content, resources, and tools should be able to grow with them. The very global nature of OLPC demands that growth be driven locally, in large part by the children themselves. Each child with an XO can leverage the learning of every other child. They teach each other, share ideas, and through the social nature of the interface, support each other’s intellectual growth. Children are learners and teachers.

There is no inherent external dependency in being able to localize software into their language, fix the software to remove bugs, and repurpose the software to fit their needs. Nor is there any restriction in regard to redistribution; OLPC cannot know and should not control how the tools we create will be re-purposed in the future.

A world of great software and content is necessary to make this project succeed, both open and proprietary. Children need to be able to choose from all of it. In our context of learning where knowledge must be appropriated in order to be used, it is most appropriate for knowledge to be free. Further, every child has something to contribute; we need a free and open framework that supports and encourages the very
basic human need to express.

Give me a free and open environment and I will learn and teach with joy.

No longer is it about empowering a generation of children from poorer nations and letting them learn with the ability to help improve the platform they operate on…what it’s now about:

“‘The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible. Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn’t matter. It’s about getting it into kids’ hands. Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for.’”

…just like a fun toy right? <sarcasm>Let’s drop Nintendo DS gaming systems into their hands…laptops, laptops, laptops…that’s what it is about…because we’re all about getting the technology to the kids. </sarcasm> We’re not about empowering them to learn about computers, networks, and software. We’re not about them learning on a system where there are no limits. As RMS states, “Teaching children to use a proprietary (non-free) system such as Windows does not make the world a better place, because it
puts them under the power of the system’s developer.” That developer is Microsoft.

Congratulations go to Microsoft for bringing proprietary lockin to millions of kids worldwide who will no longer be able to take pride in their own contributions the the core OS, who will no longer feel community ownership, and who will no longer be the sole operator of their own open source software based XO.

Our children our the future and what we aren’t teaching them with closed source software is just as important as what we ARE teaching them.

OLPC Mission Has Changed originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on May 2, 2008.

PCLinuxOS has a rolling release cycle. With this type of cycle, updates are continuously applied to the software repository so much so that after a bit of time, a snapshot of the repository would constitute a new release…say 2007.01 or something similar. This has always been the way PCLinuxOS is released as many of us that have been with it since the early days can attest to.

The other nice thing about the rolling release cycle is that there are no set dates to releasing. This means that the release is up to the developers. As PCLinuxOS has proven many times over…it’s about perfection. Texstar doesn’t release until he feels everything has been thoroughly tested…so much so that he often times will hold off weeks at a time for a release just to clamp down on the final small bugs that might only effect 5% of the user base. The quality of product the dev team produces is astounding because of this.

The last thing I love about a rolling release is that updates are seamless. For many of us that had Preview .81 or .71 on our boxes in the earlier days of PCLinuxOS, we found that updating all the way to .93a was a snap. That’s right, 3-5 releases could be upated via synaptic without incident. This was a huge draw to me in the early days. PCLinuxOS was originally forked from Mandriva 9.2 and developed away from it…when we rebased this past year for 2007 it was due to glibc/GCC4 updates that our small developer team wouldn’t be able to do. This rebase would prevent a user from updating .71 to 2007 now…but the concept of seamless upgrades is still one that PCLOS developers strive for. It’s going to be quite nice as development continues to be able to do this.

Is PCLinuxOS and the rolling release perfect? No. Do others get it right with a standard release cycle? Yes. Could PCLinuxOS benefit from a standard release cycle? It depends on what your definition of benefit is. If, by benefit, you mean always maintaining a set schedule of releases and giving PCLOS a software development/business type of feel…yes, it would benefit. But if you’re thinking of benefit from the perspective of an active dev team that feels little pressure or deadline…a thriving community of satisfied users that can count on seamless upgrades…I’d say that NO it wouldn’t benefit PCLinuxOS at all.

I’d like to hear what readers think about rolling updates and how they see these as beneficial or not beneficial to a distribution. Thanks for reading!

The Absent PCLinuxOS Release Cycle originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on October 23, 2007.