Strange, I remember going to linux conferences, of which the OLPC talks were heavily attended; competitions to win one were heavily patronised; colleagues going for the G1G1 program. There was a ton of interest in this low-cost, open-source laptop project. I remember the &quot;for the children&quot; argument for why they were partnering with Microsoft. The FLOSS community was pretty vocal in asking please don&#x27;t do this, but OLPC ignored them. The buzz died, and the media moved on as a result. It didn&#x27;t matter that MS never shipped in great numbers[1]; the damage was done.<p>It was mismanaged, absolutely, and the proposed MS partnership wasn&#x27;t the only nail in the coffin. But with my own eyes I&#x27;ve seen a lot more interest than &quot;noise on blogs&quot;. With that silly move, OLPC lost a pool of enthusiastic, free developers and media buzz. It also caused the OLPC chief of software to resign.<p>Given that you disparage the FLOSS complaints as just &quot;noise on blogs&quot;, it&#x27;s clear you didn&#x27;t read the complaints. It had little to do with dimes moving from OLPC to MS. The issue was OLPC letting MS use them as a conduit to train new users in &#x27;the windows way&#x27; - that MS was effectively going to co-opt OLPC as a loss-leader program. How far would OLPC go with MS? Why bother developing when they&#x27;re so intent on providing XP on a clearly underspecced machine for it? And how could a sluggish OS actually be a decision &#x27;for the kids&#x27;? How else would OLPC break their previously loud promises? The license fees really had nothing to do with the FLOSS community largely abandoning interest in the project.<p>[1] You&#x27;re wrong about Windows never shipping. Windows-<i>only</i> machines never shipped, but dual-boot Windows machines did.