p2pnet.net News View:- While I don’t read every SlashDot article, I do get one of those daily summaries of articles and three articles from this morning’s summary caught my attention:

OLPC Gets a New Name, New Features
Vista the Last of Its Kind
Indian State Logs Microsoft Out

The article about Vista talks about how operating systems are getting so large and complex that migration strategies from older software is getting harder and harder for companies like Microsoft.

While this article talks of virtualization as the solution, many others over the years have suggested the use of peer production/distribution techniques (ie, FLOSS) is a better solution because it allows different teams to focus on specific components and provide better incremental upgrade paths. It’s not just the monolyth of software that needs to be virtualized, but the monolith software vendors.

What virtualization techniques offer for software, FLOSS offers for the software industry.

What’s often said to be missing in discussions about the future FLOSS is: this perception that few people are adequately trained in peer production/distribution (allowing the marginal cost of knowledge development and distribution for the producer of zero be harnessed by having the marginal cost for users and follow-on developers also be zero) techniques and business models.

The project previously known as “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC), which is now producing an entirely FLOSS-based laptop called the Children’s Machine 1 (CM1), will bring up a generation of people in majority-world countries (sometimes called “third world” countries, or the poor countries that contain the majority of the worlds population) on the concepts of sharing knowledge.

These laptops have wireless capabilities that treat each other as peers that can directly speak to each other, without there needing to be an “access point”, a server, or any other external network.

These machines also act as nodes in a mesh network, allowing the children to talk over larger distances by hopping through a laptop that happens to be in the middle. The children will grow up in an environment where it’s not only acceptable to share the regular curriculum and the multimedia they create, butin which it’sis the norm to legally share software.

Those with the skills will be able to read the source code for the software and improve upon it, further building a culture of sharing and independence.

While it’s great to reach children early, we also need ways to reach adults, businesses and governments. The move of the state of Kerala , India, to have high schools move to FLOSS is a slow movement up in age. As these students enter the workforce, they’ll hopefully be able to educate some of their older colleagues about the advantages of FLOSS and peer production/distribution.

Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He’s also the CLUE policy coordinator.]