One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the Delaware, USA based, non-profit organization, created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, set up to oversee The Children’s Machine project and the construction of the XO-1 "$100 laptop". Both the project and the organization were announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005. It has attracted news whirl, since its birth, once again it’s in limelight reason-Microsoft.

Microsoft Corp. this week said that it is working on a version of Windows XP operating system compatible with laptops from OLPC. The company said that Windows XP may work already on the current XO model, which was once supposed to sell for $100; obviously they are targeting future versions of the notebook as well. Microsoft’s appearance certainly contradicting the OLPC policy described here, which says-

XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms…… We are using open-document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole expresses uncertainty on this during an interview on Thursday.(Source Reuters)

We’re spending a nontrivial amount of money on it … We remain hopeful with our progress to date, we still have significant work ahead to finalize our analysis and testing processes,….At the end of the day, there’s no guarantee.

The small green-and-white XO laptops were designed specifically to run Linux programs. If the machines run only Linux, Microsoft will lose an opportunity to expose tens of millions of children worldwide to its Windows system.

Microsoft has in regards of the OLPC’s XO personal computer are performance limits. Minimum system requirements for Windows XP include 233MHz x86 central processing unit and 128MB of memory, which is something that the current OLPC laptop has, but besides Windows XP requires 1.5GB of hard disk drive space, which means that Microsoft needs to substantially cut-down features of the system in order to fit it onto 1GB flash storage of the XO. The computer requires just 2 watts of power compared with the typical laptop’s 30 to 40 watts and does away with hard drives, relying instead on flash memory and four USB ports to add memory devices.

As the situation states, it will take more than just few feature alternation of XP, to be ready for XO. On the other hand will OLPC, alter the concept it started on-the open source?