Free Books and One Laptop Per Child

Brewster Kahle recently announced at the Boston Bookfair that his organization, the Internet Archive, was collaborating with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation to provide the Internet Archive’s collection of 1.6 million e-books to users of the OLPC laptop at no cost. On May 15^th, 2008 the director of the OLPC announced that the organization would no longer only be using a distribution of the open-source operating system, Linux, but would instead be shipping some versions of the OLPC laptop with Windows as well. The decision prompted controversy within the organization, which had previously been committed to open-source software—that is, software whose code is available for public inspection, and which can be shared, altered, and re-distributed. Richard Stallman argued in the Boston Review’s 2008 Winter edition, that the inclusion of Windows constituted a violation of the organization’s commitment to open-source software.

The issue of open-source software’s role in OLPC returned with the news that the Internet Archive has plans to make its e-books available to OLPC users. The Internet Archive is reformatting all of its public domain books to the Epub format, an open-source e-book format that allows laptops to rescale e-books to fit the screen of the device. Students using the OLPC laptop will no doubt benefit from these free books. They will benefit, however, simply because the collaboration puts free books on their computer screens—not because they read those books with open source software. Some open-source activists adhere to the misguided view that the poor of the world deserve computers with only open-source software or that software companies seeking to profit from the poor are unethical. Elements of this attitude appear in Stallman’s article. There is nothing wrong with trying to profit from the poor as long as that act of profit does not constitute pure exploitation. Moreover, the poor deserve the right to choose a for-profit scheme if they wish, and book distribution companies like Amazon may justifiably promote their proprietary, for-profit e-book architectures in the developing world. The ethics of exploitation aside, pieces of for-profit software that run smoothly may be more valuable to people in the developing world than free, open-source software that does not. We should, therefore, celebrate this collaboration as a step in the direction of expanded access to texts, not as a victory in the open-source movement.