Community Matters

This year at LCA the OLPC folks are handing out literally dozens of XOs to randomly picked attendees - with strings attached, so to speak. Basically they tell you “do something amazing with it” - and if you think you don’t have the time or skill to do that, they ask you to pass it on to someone else who does.

I think this is a brilliant way to create an active and innovative developer community around the XO - linux.conf.au certainly brings together a lot of the top Linux developers and the implied social contract when you get a free XO will certainly get many of the recipients thinking about what to do with them.

This is an interesting contrast to the way Asus is handling innovation around the eeePC. They needed some help to stay compliant with the GPL, they use a proprietary launcher and an in-house developed and maintained variant of the Xandros Linux distribution. All not exactly signs of embracing and understanding open source and the community around it that could help them be successful. Still, I see a lot of people here at the conference with eeePCs (obviously the list includes myself). It’ll be interesting to see how these different approaches work out for both sides…

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