Co-Founder and Chairman of the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nicholas Negroponte shows off the new ‘One Hundred Dollar Laptop’ during a media conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in this file photo taken Saturday Jan. 28, 2006. One of the most ambitious aspects of the ‘$100 laptop’ project for schoolchildren in developing countries is the machines’ open-source software platform, designed to be intuitive to kids. That’s why many people were taken aback last week when the founder of the nonprofit laptop project, Nicholas Negroponte, announced that buyers of the machine will be able to add Windows, the proprietary software from Microsoft Corp. that open-source adherents love to despise.

Link