Simon Scullion

Jonathan Carter has an update on the goings on regarding the Classmate PCs in Nigeria:

The plot has thickened as more details emerges in a PC World article.

The funder of 11000 of the 17000 classmate PC’s is insisting that Mandriva remains on the machines, at least for now. This will have a big impact on the project as a whole, and Mandriva might just yet be the default system on all these machines after all.

In the article it also mentions that the Microsoft country manager for Nigeria, Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu wrote that Microsoft is working on an agreement with the Technology Support Center (which seems to be an independent service provider in Nigeria) to pay them US$400 000 for marketing activities around the classmate, if they switch to Windows.

Hopefully this means the door is not cloased on Mandriva.

While I can understand the stakes are high for Microsoft, if only half of this is true, their ethics need questioning.

Tags: Mandrivawindows microsoft linux ethics Nigeria

Yet more strange decisions regarding software choices where Microsoft is involved.

François Bancilhon writes an open letter to Steve Ballmer regarding the news that Mandriva Linux will be replaced by Windows XP on the 17,000 Classmate PCs for Nigerian schools.

We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.

Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.”

This raises so many questions, both business and ethics. How much pressure and money did MS throw at this?

We will probably never know the truth, and it is likely not going to swing back Mandriva’s way. Unfortunately. Such a shame that so many children will have there first computing experiences tarnished by politics and an out-of-date OS running on low powered hardware.

It is the apparent lack of ethics and arrogance that Microsoft seem to be showing that really gets my goat.

Plenty more commentary out there including this and this.

If Microsoft had used Open Standards from the moment it was founded in 1975, this problem would not exist.

Couldn’t have put it better myself! The problem being discussed is, you guessed it, Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.

Via Chris Linfoot from the Free Software Foundation Europe, on the beeb

This rather (in my opinion) poor piece of journalism from the BBC quoting Gates on Vista sales figures caught my interest, particularly following the news this week regarding Microsoft’s threat to persue patent royalties from open source initiatives such as Linux and OpenOffice.org. (Link via Bub Sutor).

Mr Gates said sales had been quicker than Microsoft expected, and made Vista the firm’s quickest selling software.

What!? Does anyone believe this stuff? What upset me about the article from the beeb was the lack of comment or verification of Gates’ statement. There is plenty on this out there, so you can do your own searches on google, but with Vista sales being reported as slow, Dell offering linux and bringing back Windows XP, how can it be Microsoft’s quickest selling software?

Oh, and to say sales were quicker than they had expected, that just makes me wonder just how low their expectations really were!

Just where are MS going? They are appearing increasingly deperate and looking to create confusion. Smells like fear to me.

My take on all this, forget Vista and move to Ubuntu.