Ask the Egyptian Installfest Organizers

The Linux-Egypt group recently held an amazingly successful installfest. This event was a milestone both for Linux installfests in general (was it the largest one ever held?) and for Linux in the Arabic world. Alaa Abd El Fatah, one of the organizers, has offered to answer your questions with help from other Linux-Egypt members. We'll post their answers to 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions as soon as we get them back.

Comments

History of Egypt motivation to switching to Linux

[kbahey]

Here is some background, based on experience of relatives living in Egypt. I am Egyptian myself, but have not been living there for 15+ years.

In the 90s, Microsoft turned a blind eye to piracy. They simply did not care what happens in the Arab world (software wise). They ignored that market. Arabization of products normally followed a delayed schedule, with the latest product being not in Arabic. When Windows 3.x came out, there was a competing Arabization by Al Alamiah, a Kuwaiti company. The lead architect (cant' remember his name, but either Lebanese or Syrian) there was enticed into leaving Al Alamiah and join Microsoft. There was a brief law suit then. In the end Microsoft was dominant in the Arabization area. Product release in Arabic still lagged behind English and other Western languages.

Then, in the mid 90s, Microsoft started to enforce licenses on businesses. In Egypt, a newly formed Shortet El Mosanafat El Faneyya (literally: Artistic Products Police, more like: "Intellectual Property Police") started raiding large, medium and small businesses to check if their software was licensed. They specifically looked for certain products and ignored others (e.g. Microsoft stuff, AutoCAD in Engineering firms, Oracle, but not Novel [if I remember correctly], nor Apple).

Rumor at the time had it that some rich and powerful people (ruling elite) made a cut with Microsoft in all this.

Remember that the US Dollar was around 3.4 Egyptian pound at the time. Making legal software very costly for the small business.

This scared small businesses, and some relatives I know migrated from Microsoft Windows and Fox Pro applications to Linux and SQL-Ledger for example. There was so much resentment for Microsoft at the time for doing this, and the powers who enforced it.

Now, the exchange rate is about 6.5 Egyptian Pounds to 1 US Dollar, so it has gotten even worse (more prohibitive cost of Microsoft software).

However, in the internet land, another development was taking place around the turn of the Millenium. Many developers for the internet knew nothing but Microsoft, so they used its technologies to develop web sites (ASP, MS SQL, NT/2000/XP, ...etc.) More importantly, this led to many web sites showing correctly in Arabic ONLY when used Internet Explorer.

This means that people at home or in offices who do not have Windows and IE will not be able to interact properly with web sites. Al Jazeera web site for example shows only the middle pane in FireFox, and the side menus are only visible under IE.

Arabs are around 300 million, is supposed to be the 5th most widely spoken language in the world. For a company to gain a monopoly on an entire culture is simply wrong and unacceptable, but it did happen.

the bright side is that Linux is making some inroads. But there are obstacles (e.g. Arabic web sites which are IE centric, as above).

Yes, boycott of American products may have played a role since 2000 (with the Palestinian uprising, then the post-Sept 11 events). But more pragmatic factors were there far before any of this came into play, and Microsoft was (and still is) not liked by many (just like the rest of us Open Source advocates in the West do not like thm either).