“..so the world would be better off if the OLPC project had never existed.”

by Jon Thompson on November 4, 2008

I found this article by Richard Stallman on Reddit.  Good stuff, although at times a bit over the top:

Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco. Like any addictive drug, it inculcates a harmful dependency. (Bill Gates made this comparison in a 1998 issue of Fortune Magazine.) No wonder Microsoft offers the first dose to children at a low price. Microsoft aims to teach poor children this dependency so they can smoke Windows for their whole lives. I don’t think governments or schools should support that aim.

Funny, I was once accused of being too ‘Stallmanesque’.

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