Researching Open Source

philippInAfrica writes "bridges.org just released the software comparison study that looks at free/open source software and proprietary software in community computer labs in Africa. The announcement is on bridges, or you can download the full report in PDF form. To our knowledge, this is the largest field study of its kind in developing countries - we visited 121 computer labs in Namibia, Uganda and South Africa - and we are making all data available to other researchers. Feedback from the international ./ community would be great."

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Key observations from the study (cut n paste)

[emj]

• Both free/open source software and proprietary software can be used to offer
  technology solutions appropriate for African public-access computer labs.
  
• The thin-client model provides a reliable, cost-effective and popular solution
  for public-access computer labs in Africa.
  
• Software license costs for proprietary software are significant in principle, but
  in practice they are not borne by many of the public-access computer labs in
  Africa.
  
• At ground level in Africa, the potential for cost savings gained from the use of
  FOSS depends on many factors.
  
• General ICT skills levels -- especially for installation and maintenance of
  software -- are low overall, and experience with proprietary software is more
  pervasive.
  
• Training courses for PS are more widely available than for FOSS.
  
• The fact that FOSS makes source code available and encourages modifications
  is not exploited by the vast majority of public-access lab staff or users in
  Africa because they lack the necessary skills. However, it does offers an
  opportunity for local service providers to create customised applications.
  
• The availability and quality of local technical support in Africa (for both
  free/open source and proprietary software) is reasonably high overall,
  although FOSS support tends to rely on free services.
  
• While there are a number of projects underway to translate software into
  African languages, these localised versions are not yet widely used in publicaccess
  labs and there is some disagreement about the value of local language
  software.
  
• Most FOSS labs in Africa are set up and supported by a small group of
  enthusiastic implementing organisations, so the success of FOSS labs relies
  heavily on their efforts.
  
• General trends with regard to economic situation, age of the lab, and staff
  experience can be identified among labs that use the same type of software.
  

The ? community

[tquinlan]

Feedback from the international ./ community would be great."

The dotslash community? Are we a bunch of shell scripts now? ;)

arrogance of free software developers

[lkcl]

got your attention? good.

in 1997, i did a talk on samba. when the question asked was "why should we bother to interoperate with proprietary protocols when we are [clever enough] to write our own and we don't _need_ to interoperate [with microsoft]", everybody clapped.

that was a _very_ interesting and defining moment, because it told me that everyone in that room lacked any sense of responsibility associated with their intelligence, capabilities, and the opportunities that their education and environment had presented them.

now, there's someone here at bridges.org pointing out that Free Software is pretty much useless to people who need it the most.

i hope that this article will bring that home more clearly - that the ignorance and ego [definition of arrogance] of free software developers needs to go.

if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility.

Re:arrogance of free software developers

[hey!]

now, there's someone here at bridges.org pointing out that Free Software is pretty much useless to people who need it the most.

Sucks the way the glass tends to be half empty, doesn't it?

Free software is useless, because it appears there isn't a statistical difference in the success rate between people who choose free software vs. people who choose proprietary. Let's assume by the way that there is no difference between those populations.

Free software developers are irresponsible because they have greater enthusiasm for the idea of making a new protocol than implementing a widely used and widely despised one. This "Not Invented Here" attitude is only found among free software engineers. Also, discount the fact they've actually done it. A responsible person only does what he thinks is the most fun; the difference is that he always finds the most important work the most fun.

i hope that this article will bring that home more clearly - that the ignorance and ego [definition of arrogance] of free software developers needs to go.

I couldn't help teasing you here a bit, because it seems to me you're position here is so unrealistic. Ignorance is always bad of course, but successful people, it seems to me, nearly always have a streak of ego and arrogance in them, they just know what to do with it better than other people. The most likeable of them also have an ability to simultaneously embody arrogance and humility, and maybe this makes them more successful as human beings. But I've often seem humility without success, ego without success, and success without humility. What I never seem to see is success without at least a dash of ego.

Re:arrogance of free software developers

[mckyj57]

Who's the arrogant one here?

that was a _very_ interesting and defining moment, because it told me that
everyone in that room...[snip]

Everyone? Come on now, a few people clapped. You are arrogantly assuming no
one else is as "enlightened" as you.

if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility.

I have the ability to do about 50% of the jobs in the world, if not
more. Should I accept the responsibility for them? Obviously not. Even
if I were Superman and could do half of them, I would force half of the
world's people into unemployment.

You may think I am being facetious there, but the point is that we
sometimes have to wait for someone else to do something before they
*will* do it. Similarly, we sometimes have to wait for consensus if we
want to move an idea forward. Not everyone is going to come around right
away -- they have their own hot buttons and their own agendas.

We do the best we can with what we are given. And those of us who *can* do,
know that sometimes the best thing is to *not* do.

Unlicensed copies of proprietary software?

[KingSkippus]

From the "Key ground-level findings":

...the fact that FOSS is available free of license costs has little financial benefits for African labs, which almost never pay for the software they use because of donations and unlicensed copies.

Donations, fine, but unlicensed copies? So they're saying that one consideration in the FOSS versus proprietary software situation is the willingness of the public labs to break international copyright laws?

Okay, maybe I can accept that from an informational standpoint, but are decisions on how to proceed and what software is going to be used going to be made based on this information?

[This study] was published this week to provide needed background information and advice to people who want to make sound software choices that are right for their local environments...

Oh, I guess indeed they are.

Re:Unlicensed copies of proprietary software?

[KingSkippus]

To the repliers of this post, I wanted to make a couple of points.

First of all, I know that not everyone thinks like me and that copyright laws are not exactly a determining factor in many of these government's decisions. That's why I stated that I can accept this from an informational standpoint. However, the self-stated purpose of the study is not just to provide information, but also advice. As such, I am worried that people reading the study may make the decision to go with commercial software because it's okay to pirate that software. Bridges.org is a joint American / South African organization, so I wouldn't think that this is the kind of inferrence that they would want people to draw.

Second, I hate to point out the obvious, but one of the points I would hope that a study like this--one that provides advice--would try to emphasize is that these African labs don't have to scrounge to get the software they need, and no one needs to break international copyright laws, no matter how little regard they have for those laws. That's kind of the point of FOSS. Or stated another way, why pirate software when you can get software of the same or better quality to do the same thing for free? It seems to me that they're implying, "Cost isn't (shouldn't be?) a factor in your decision, because commercial software is free, too."

Re:Unlicensed copies of proprietary software?

[Penguin Programmer]

I agree that the willingness of the labs to use unlicensed non-free software is probably not a good fact upon which to base decisions about software. However, it is important to remember that no one - not even Microsoft - is going to go after a community computer lab in developing Africa for using pirated software. It would be a public relations nightmare, and not worth their time and money since they can't afford to pay for the software anyway. For these labs, pirated software is a perfectly viable option, so it needs to be taken into account in policy decisions.

Arrogance?

[KingSkippus]

Umm...

From the Samba home page:

Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that has, since 1992, provided file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. Samba is freely available under the GNU General Public License.

Am I missing something? Samba was developed by a bunch of (ignorant? arrogant?) free software developers.

Someone doesn't know what they're talking about

[KingSkippus]

Oh, and one more thing. I don't know if you don't know what you're talking about or the people at your meeting didn't know, but neither Samba nor SMB/CIFS, the protocol on which it is based, is a proprietary protocol. It's implementation within Windows is, but the protocol itself isn't. From an article about CIFS posted at Microsoft:

CIFS is an open, cross-platform technology based on the native file-sharing protocols built into Microsoft Windows and other popular PC operating systems, and supported on dozens of other platforms.

In either case, someone is a nutcase. If it's the speaker at your meeting, he or she is certainly not representative of the open source development community I've seen and experienced, and I'm probably inclined to agree that he or she is ignorant and arrogant. If it's you, well then, you do deserve to be modded down in spite of your complaining reply to your own post.

(No offense, but I'm leaning toward believing that in this case, it's you...)

WSIS related symposium

[mattr]

I recently participated in the Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Conference, part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which was intended to develop a draft constitution on development of IT-enhanced society for the 21st century, with attention to north-south and social development issues. Anyway, it included a lot of people who are into open source and a lot of people interested in rural connectivity so you might be interested in some of the documents.

In particular there are maps of African connectivity (Dr. Dzvimbo's) and mentions of use in education (like Dr. Miyagawa from MIT's OpenCourseware).

The U.S. in 2003 (at the first part of this conference) apparently was against the final draft saying anything about open source or choosing open source over commercial software. However this time it seems open source is being explicitly covered.

One interesting person there was Mike Reed, Director of United Nations University's International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST). He talked about their hiring 10 open source developers to develop a standardized desktop distro for learning in the third world. He's a famous mathematician and computer scientist, in particular he wants to mathematically prove that a distro and its programs will "just work" which sounds pretty interesting. Anybody wanting to go to Macau should contact him!

I converted all the pdfs to text and grepped "open source" below FYI.

D-22ChairmansReport.txt: Be development-oriented, ensuring equitable and sustainable distribution of resources Recognize the goal of accessibility for all, emphasizing the needs of people with disabilities and the poor Respect the Internet end-to-end principles and open source, open content, open courseware, and open standards Uphold human rights, rights to self-determination, and particularly the risks to privacy and leakage of personal information

D-23chairmans_report.txt: Be development-oriented, ensuring equitable and sustainable distribution of resources Recognize the goal of accessibility for all, emphasizing the needs of people with disabilities and the poor Respect the Internet end-to-end principles and open source, open content, open courseware, and open standards Uphold human rights, rights to self-determination, and particularly the risks to privacy, for example from the leakage of personal information

S2-3DrDZVIMBO.txt:The possibilities Click to edit Master title style ClickA majorto editinitiativeMasterthattexthasstylesnow emerged is the development of Free Open Source institutions. (e.g. Nairobi, Agadir, Cape African institutions are also developing initiatives to foster the development of Learning Object Repositories by university academics and Research Networks.

S2-5ProfOkamura.txt:Regional Support PEACESAT U.S. establishing Pacific ICT Academy in American Samoa MOODLE implemented in American Samoa, CNMI and Guam Open Source Squid, Apache, others

S2-5ProfOkamura.txt:Regional Support Activities PEACESAT U.S. establishing Pacific ICT Academy in American Samoa Open Source Software

S2-5ProfOkamura.txt:Suggestion #3c ICT Infrastructure 3 Suggestion Open source and other inexpensive technologies should be encouraged. Rationale The cost of software and applications are potential problems. e.g. American Samoa implemented VA Clinical Information System.

S4-1BANKS.txt: Perspectives of marginilised groups, excluded communities, grassroots activists Expertise, skills, experience & knowledge human rights, sustainable development, privacy & security, education, women's empowerment & gender equality, affordable universal access, open standards & interoperability, open source, open content & universal design for all

s4-2FRAU-MEIGSDivinaRev1.txt:Tools for Open Access: An open source backbone An education exemption to IP rights A Universal Service Fund Interoperabil