"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.
"The OLPC was supposed to avoid that harmful result by using the
free operating system GNU/Linux. Even more exciting for me, a
lower-level piece of software, the startup program or "BIOS," was
going to be free as well. There were many laptops capable of
running a free GNU/Linux system, and I used one of them; there was
already a free BIOS, but no manufacturers had ever published the
information a developer would need to make the free BIOS run on
their laptops."
