More info on the progress of the $100 laptop…

An interesting little bit from the article:

TS: According to an article that ran in the Wall Street Journal, OLPC turned down Apple’s offer of free copies of Mac OS X. Care to explain why?

MB: First, we think that it’s important to be able to tinker with the operating system, and OS X is hard to tinker with.

The second reason is that it’s a memory footprint issue, and there’s no way to take down OS X so that it runs at 128MB of memory. Now if it were the old NeXTSTEP, we could do it, so technically it’s doable. If people want to port a version of OS X to run on the laptop — and I think that it will happen if we ship it in large quantities — they are free to do it; the platform is open.

We definitely appreciated it (Apple’s offer) very much; it’s not like we wanted to snub anybody or that we don’t think OS X is a great operating system. It’s just that we made shipping an open-source operating system a fundamental pillar of our strategy.

[VIA seanmcdonald.ca]