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UN Supports OSS/Free Software In Developing World
headisdead writes "This BBC report has details of the IOSN's (International Open Source Network) role in yesterday's Software Freedom Day. As the article rightly points out, the economic potential of these new markets for large tech corporations like MS makes this a real battle in the making. Question is, can Free Software really stem the tide when other sustainal development projects are struggling so much?"
This all comes down to money.
How can you compete against free, when the customers have little or no money.
A school in an underdeveloped country buys 100 old PCs.
Would you use 100 licenced copies of XP, or just download a linux iso for free?
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Here is their official website since the article
fails to mention it anywhere
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Some organisations are already using open source software in their work. Look at FAIR (http://www.fair.no/english/home.htm), a norwegain project that are bringing ICT-equipment to development countries. They are aming to use Skolelinux (http://www.skolelinux.org/) in their projects.
I apologise to our Danish friends for Slashdotting their server, but I just had to share this gallery from the Copenhagen event (It was a world-wide day, not just Asia). Check the penguin and devil suits :)
They write in the SFD wiki:
Update: Our Local event was a huge success!
We handed out 300 CD's in little less than an hour.... We also had 500 balloons promoting the day, and we gave out balloons to every stroller, child and adult who wanted one - in fact people came over to our booth asking for free balloons....
The balloons were red with white text, saying Software Freedom Day 2004 on the front and having penguin footprints on the back.
We had help from about 25 volunteers, a large Tux, a little Tux and a daemon
All the volunteers were wearing red t-shirts with white text, saying Software Freedom Day 2004 on the front and "Free Software er foran" at the back. The text in Danish has two meanings, first "Free Software is at the frontier" (we are ahead), second - you could get your free copy of the CDs, at the front of the person wearing the t-shirt....
It was very fun - and its not the last time we are willing to do this!
The Boston team handed out 450 CD packs in the park, in Goa, India 200 people got together to celebrate, etc. (reports are still coming in)
"Love it or hate it, any idiot can use Windows."
*Sigh*
No, he can't. Look at the millions of infected PCs, just work one day at a help desk for normal users and you will know that most people are not able to use Windows.
P.S.: Just because a lot of idiots use Windows doesn't mean any idiot can use it. Btw., I know a lot of idiots using Linux, what does that tell us?
We had a nice time promoting the localized GNU/Linux (site not upto date with the work) on the Free Software Day. The response was phenominal, and we can see more and more people and commercial organizations are coming forward to help us take the message across.
And we make it clear that FOSS is better not because of the cost, but because of the flexibility, freedom and control that comes with it, and the mindset change from dependence to independence.
Isn't empowering people one of the main ideas of free software? So giving people that until now had no means to use modern information systems the opportunity to finally participate is great and somehow at the heart of the free software movement.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is great that Linux (or rather GNU/Linux) is making inroads in corporate environments and has a lot of backing from big business like IBM, HP, etc., but I sometimes got the impression that the most important idea behind free software, giving the people means to make more of their lives, somehow slipped into the background recently.
So in this sense this is really going back to the roots of free software and that's a good thing.
I would say Bill Gates doesn't mind. In fact, he might even give away a special edition of Window just so he "indoctrinate" the youth and thus lead that generation to the life of Microsoft. Think about it. Once your a Windows user, most people stay that way. But if you started off using Mac, then that will be your religious..err..I mean..user friendly path in life.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yep. The IOSN team has spent the better part of last week contacting reporters, correcting news stories and still, this story won't die. They contacted over 60 news agencies last week. BBC's original version was the standard mistake: "UN organizes software freedom day". Fortunately, BBC is responsive and by the time Slashdot got to it, it's the corrected version. Still, the UN angle is too strong for any of the news agencies to resist.
Sorry Henrik. They're doing the best they can but it's crazy how this story keeps spreading.
A friend's daughter (13 years old) was at our house this weekend, and wanted to "play on the computer", which is loaded with straight-up Debian.
She watched me click on the menus to pull up a couple of games, and then she was good to go. She played and had a good time all afternoon, exploring the selection of games (Frozen Bubbles and Defenguin were her favorites).
Her comment at the end of the day was "you sure have a cool computer to play on". I think inexperience actually -helps-, as there is nothing to unlearn. Clicking on icons is clicking on icons, I have watched a lot of people sit down on my Deb system and just start "doing stuff". I have noticed that the hard-core Windows users have the hardest time, but the casual users really have no problem.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
There's nothing stopping most corporations from supporting languages like Chinese and Thai except laziness, pure and simple. OSS has had the edge in this arena for two reasons:
- No profit motive. It has classically not been profitable to support languages spoken in third world countries, or in countries where the population was relatively small. Because OSS developers don't care about money (usually), this doesn't matter.
- Developed over the internet in an open way. This has allowed developers speaking minority languages to "scratch their itch" and localize apps they use frequently. In a corporate model, this doesn't work because a) techies hired in Europe or the US don't usually completely understand the complexities of non-roman scripts, etc. and b) closed source means that translation by users has not generally been feasible.
Consider though: for point 1, a profit motive is developing. China, India, Thailand, etc are actually becoming markets that software companies care about being a part of, if only to keep Linux and OSS from getting a hold there.For point 2, outsourcing is guaranteeing that there are lots of folks in the third world collaborating closely with company in question, meaning that access to native speakers of problem languages is becoming less of a problem. It's not just outsourcing, it's globalization as a whole.
In my opinion, the corps will never be able to compete with Free Software on the localization front, because all it takes to get a free program localized is someone annoyed enough by it not being. Still, the lead we have right now on the important languages will probably be closed. We'll still win when it comes to software available in Twi, Esperanto, Breton, and other "minority" languages, but you can bet that the corps aren't going to let us have China and India without a fight.
Of course, even if they fight, we'll still win.
c|net interview 2 jul 1998
Key phrase: "As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
My sibling posts say the same thing I'm going to: the true advantage of Free Software is freedom. But let me explain why.
Microsoft is seen worldwide as a very successful American corporation. This is not surprising, because, well, it is. Many countries (China in particular) are nervous about allowing an American corporation to control their IT infrastructure with so many little black boxes.
The Chinese government did not choose to move towards OSS because it likes Linux's interface more, or because it costs less than MS. It's moving in that direction because Linux, and all free software, is trustworthy. Cost doesn't factor in. With Linux, they have an enterprise level operating system that scales to absurd numbers of processors that can be audited and modified. A starting point, if you will. They know there are no backdoors because they can take a look.
Microsoft and Sun and most of the big guys offer "Shared Source" like systems that seem to offer the same deal, but it isn't the same at all. Because while you're welcome to take a look at the source, you're not free to change it. And with a vendor comes vendor lock-in; for example, suppose the Chinese government buys MS's bit and goes for Windows instead of Linux, using MS's shared source initiative as a means to "look through" the code. They do this, and build their entire infrastructure on MS solutions. Write their documents in Word. Etc. After a few years of this, MS could just stop offering the Shared Source initiative. Stop allowing their code to be audited. And by then, the Chinese gov't is screwed, big time. They know they should dump MS, but they can't; their whole country runs on the stuff, depends on its proprietary formats, etc.
But Linux will always be free. There is no evil American corporation controlling it, possibly putting backdoors into its software to steal your most precious secrets. Because its source is open and documented, there can be no format lock-in.
For foreign governments with no reason to trust the US or anything that comes out of it, the fact that Linux is free as in freedom, rather than free as in cost, is the true selling point.
As an aside, your point about Linux requiring sysadmins, support (and thus actually costing money and not being truly for-free) etc is a non-starter. This is trivially true of all software. Microsoft/Sun/etc software also have maintenance and support costs. Unless you're saying that the cost of obtaining MS/Sun/etc software PLUS the cost of maintaining it over a long period of time is lower than just the cost of maintaining a free system, you have no point. If you are saying that, it's just MS's "lower TCO" argument in disguise, which has been dissected here a million times and which not many of us believe, so I won't bother ripping into it.