The $100 Linux Laptop is now a $200 Windows XP box. The XO (or OLPC) will eventually come as a dual boot machine, loaded with both XP and the weird icon-only XO flavor of Linux, called Sugar. First though, an XP-only version will ship, and will cost an extra $20 over the ever-fluctuating price of the original. $3 of this will go to Microsoft and the rest will take care of hardware changes to accommodate the new OS.
It seems that the developing world wants exactly the same as the rest of us: Windows. A janky, kid-friendly operating system might be fine in theory, but when it comes to shifting units, governments want something a little more useful, something that will fit in with what people perceive as a real computer. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte:
We can't help thinking that the OLPC should have shipped with something a little more conventional from the beginning. Something like Ubuntu Linux.
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