Open Source Africa

Toucan Sam writes, "This could be of some interest to those who see the Linux community as being reserved for the first world exclusively." This doesn't just apply to Africa, but it's good to see that some people are thinking internationally.

Comments

Information Access & Connectivity

[fingal]

[offtopic]I find it slightly sad that whenever a story concerning non-US localised things that not only do the trolls feel it time to put on their racist bigot heads and start spouting stuff that is racist, offensive and basically fundamentally wrong, but also that people feel it necessary to sink down to their level and get involved with the fight. Leave them to it, thats what I say.[/offtopic]

Still, on a slightly lighter note, here is some stuff on the other problem that Africa faces beyond software and hardware costs which is connectivity. If you don't have a pipe then your computing options are extremely limited. If you look at The Project for Information Access and Connectivity (especially the Internet Status at Feasibility Study Universities table) you will see that most large universities are still trying to get by on a 64k (or worse) internet connection. Not totally optimal.

However, there does seem to be quite a strong move to address this problem, namely the Africa One submarine fibre optic cable project. This is a 30,000 km fibre-optic ring that will encircle the continent "by the year 2000" (I don't know of the current status although it is seems that Lucent is now involved) with 32 main pipes from the ring into coastal landing points.

Once this system is in place and local governments (hopefully) see the benefits of extending the pipes in-land then we should see a massive increase in the African Internet population and yes I am pretty sure that Linux will be one of the technologies that makes this possible.

The article

[Anonymous Coward]

While being a better overview of what Linux is, the article still occasionally misrepresents Linux.
My point is, though, that taking the cultural differences between the Westen world and the "less devleoped countries" into account, the social culture of the latter suits the Linux uuser profile much more.
Let me expand: In the recent article in the Boston Globe, which provoked a strong reaction from the /. users, the author states that "even technically competent people don't have the time to figure out how to install Linux".
This is a true much more for a technically competent person in the Western world than in developing countries - there the time is just not as valuable. Hence in Russia, fo instance, even with the lack of good network connections, Linux is a lot more popular than one expects.
Thanks

Linux gaining momentum in South Africa

[mav[LAG]]

This article makes some good points. Certainly very few of us in Africa can afford the kind of hardware and pipes that we see reviewed in U.S. magazines all the time.
Just to put some things in perspective:

* South Africa has more telephone lines than the rest of Africa put together yet our national telephone penetration is about 8 per 100 inhabitants.
* A 64 kilobit permanent connection to the Net here costs roughly $1000 per month.
* The telephone operator is a government-enforced monopoly which is partly owned by SBC and Telekom Malaysia
* The exchange rate of the South African Rand to the U.S. $ is about 6:1

What has all this to do with software? Quite a bit actually. The more costs you can get rid of the better, and Linux has shown itself time and again in this market to be cheaper, less expensive to run and completely free from the local piracy issues we read about on a more or less permanent basis here. This is also an extremely price-sensitive market, almost but not quite as sensitive as India.
Currently the most IT spend in the country is done by the top 100 companies but that is swinging quickly to the hundreds of thousands of SMEs. When they take the biggest piece of the IT spending pie, then Linux will become an even more popular choice for those businesses.
Microsoft in South Africa is a pretty slick operation but they've made their cock-ups. I sat in on a seminar for teachers once when the local MS salesperson threatened them all with death unless they paid full price for NT, Office and some other products. There were quite a few Linux converts that day :)
Check out this site for the local Linux umbrella body which IMHO is doing an excellent job of promoting the OS. As an example, South Africa's equivalent of Comdex attracted about 50 000 visitors last year. The local Linux lads managed to sell in the region of 15 000 RedHat and Suse distros during the show - which means nearly 1 in 3 visitors walked away with Linux on CD.