Jobs the Humanitarian

You know, I didn't see Bill Gates making this offer:

Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company's operating system, OS X, for the [$100 Laptop] machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders. "We declined because it's not open source," says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Under present plans, the first production version of the laptop will be powered by an AMD microprocessor and use an open-source Linux-based operating system supplied by Red Hat. Open-source software is not patent protected and can be copied for free.

Good for Jobs for making the offer, but good for MIT for turning him down, too. Unless its all open source, this project will just turn in to a net drain on developing economies.