Journalamentism at it's finest.

Well, by "journalism" I mean "reprinting a press release". Normally this sort of thing would be over at my other place, but since it's open source related, I figure it can go here.

I'm referring to this piece on the site itwire.com.au, which is a straight rewrite of a press release.

The piece in question is an attack on the OLPC project by a rival not-for-profit which instead works on refurbishing computers.

On the plus side, the writer of the piece did point out that FAIR mis-spoke, (or perhaps flat-out lied) in calling OLPC a "normal commercial organisation". On the minus side, there was no attempt to investigate whether the claims made were true - I'm sorry, but when it's an extreme hatchet job, "An email has been sent to the press office of OLPC inviting the organization to respond to FAIR's comments" is hardly sufficient. Note the wording - not "they didn't reply", but "we sent an email and published anyway without getting a response first". Very very poor.

Particularly when, as in this case, a number of the claims made are easily refuted using the FAQ available from the front page of the OLPC website. (It's the big link on the left hand side labelled "FAQ")

FAIR's claim that refurbished PCs are a better option is dealt with - OLPC points out that one hour of work per PC, times 100 million refurbished machines is 45,000 work years.

FAIR's claim that a single lab full of P4 computers would cost a tenth of the amount of the cost of the OLPC basis and provide the same outcomes is clearly laughable. Lets do a little math here. Assume the 500 laptops for a school - FAIR claims a tenth of US$100,000 is needed. OK. That's $10,000. Assume a lab of 16 P4 machines for $600 each, including software. That works out to around 1 hour of computer time per week per student. That's really what they think is equivalent to a machine that can be taken home?

More from FAIR: "For example, OLPC does not even offer a simple spreadsheet. Theoretically it might be possible for OLPC to be made satisfactorily compatible with PC (WIN/LIN/MAC), but it would take many years of software development to achieve this."

I have no idea if the current builds of OLPC software include a spreadsheet - but there's plenty of small Linux ones available, and I'm sure it could be added easily enough. Their focussing on this makes me suspect their own solution is to foist Windows + Office onto the 3rd world. Teaching kids office automation for an hour a week is hardly a useful set of skills - especially when compared to using a machine that they can carry around with them, and has software on it that's been designed for teaching. And if the OLPC project was starting from scratch, and trying to replicate Windows, sure, it would take years. Of course, they're doing nothing of the sort.

"With its limited 512 Mb memory it is equally likely that OLPC could never be able to become a satisfactory work station" - bollocks. Utter bollocks. Sure, you probably can't even load the Windows Vista installer in that space, but claiming that you need gigabytes of space to be useful is utterly insane and ludicrous.

Gah - I give up responding to the FAIR piece in depth. Suffice to say, it's full of easily refuted nonsense, and even a tiny amount of research would have shown that.

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Last week at LCA there were a number of folks from OLPC in the country, including Jim Gettys and Chris Blizzard. Collabra folks got voice conferencing working on the OLPC. Mention was made of the 1.3km wireless range some Australians working with the OLPC managed to get. Some of the OLPC prototypes were brought along and demonstrated at the Open Day. All very neat stuff.

Meanwhile, itwire rewrites a misleading and incorrect press release from another non-profit working as a rival to the OLPC project. And itwire's
"Open Source" writer Sam Varghese was focused like a laser on the stories that really matter:

• the ground-breaking story that Novell was a minor sponsor of LCA, and Bruce Perens doesn't like this. Gosh. Well, Bruce Perens opinion clearly outweighs GNOME, Mono and all the other work Novell does for Linux. How very silly of LCA organisers to not run all their arrangements through Perens first! I can't imagine why, with a title like "30 Pieces of Silver", this piece might be considered a trite and insulting beatup.
  
  
• Builder AU had an interview with Linus Torvalds, and the video put on the Builder AU website required a version of the flash plugin that's only been available for a short time for Linux. Note - he wasn't writing about the conference videos on the LCA site itself, which are in an open source, unencumbered format - but that the magazine Builder AU interviewed someone at LCA and put up a flash video player thingy. And he quotes someone who posted a comment on slashdot - how much more credible can you get? I think you'll agree that this is a major, major scandal, and obviously LCA should be held entirely responsible. No - wait. The other term I used: a trite and insulting beatup.
  

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I could go on further - the itwire open source articles are just full of this sort of crap. But, frankly, I don't see any point.

Kids - don't just rewrite press releases. It's not big, it's not clever, and it's not funny. And don't bother with itwire - at least, not for news about open source.

ObDisclaimer: I find the OLPC project to be extremely neat, and plan on helping them where-ever I can. I also really, really don't like bad journalism. And quite clearly, I'm speaking for myself, and not for any projects or organisations I'm involved with.

More tech stuff soon. Sorry for the interruption/rant.