by , 8:55 AM EST, November 14th, 2005

Apple offered to donate copies of Mac OS X for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) US$100 laptop program, according to the Wall Street Journal. MIT declined, siting that it wanted to use an open source operating system instead.

The $100 laptop program is a project developed by the MIT Media Lab to provide inexpensive computers to school children in developing countries. The laptops will be extremely durable, and can run off an electric adapter, or generate its own power with a hand crank. It will use processors from AMD, and will run Red Hat Linux.

Apple's offer to provide Mac OS X for the laptops points to the versatility of the operating system. The offer implies that the Intel-based version of Mac OS X can run on competing AMD processors, and may also be able to run on a wide variety of hardware.