Slashdot Mirror
Continued Look at Global Open Source
sebFlyte writes "In the second part of its look at open source in governments around the world, ZDNet takes an interesting look at open source in the developing world. Pricing obviously is an important factor (if you look at GDP, MS prices in Vietnam are the equivalent, for local people, of charging just shy of $50,000 for a Windows XP license in the US), but other issues arise, such as Brazil's 'sense of community', a certain amount of security-related worries from the Chinese, and language issues in India. A good analysis of the advantages of open source generally, the huge benefits it can have in developing markets, and the fact that open source is on the up despite massive amounts of lobbying and pressure from some proprietary vendors."
Since many users in poorer countries don't have existing systems there is no "switch" from one system to another. The users can start out using open source without having the baggage of expectations of how things SHOULD work. They have to start out by learning how to use an OS. Why not the free one?
Corruption.
The decision makers too often aren't concerned about real financial benefits of others in long term (Linux isn't that usefull for populism)
One that hath name thou can not otter
That's nonsense. Open source is world-based, *not* US-based. And if you're worried about the trade deficit perhaps it's time you do something about your Microsoft-lenient corporate-whore "patriotic" president; Clinton left you in a much better situation.
Uptake of open source is likely to be much higher in the developing world. The crazy license fees when compared to GDP as stated in the summary is one reason but the lack of an 'existing standard' is another. It is difficult for software like OpenOffice to make headway in the developed world as MS office is fairly ubiquitous.
Microsoft believe that the developing world will have to pay the fees because they will have to maintain compatibility with those of us in the west. However, it is a subtle balance. If Microsoft price themselves out of the market and the developing world look into alternative, open source solutions the it is likely that the legitimacy of tools such as open office will increase in the west too. Globalization will require internationally compatible software, and when the choice is between a western world that prefers proprietry software and a developing world which cannot afford the same software then it is a case of Microsoft dropping its prices dramatically, or the western world adopting open solutions.
Interesting times...
Awesome news. I look forward to the increasing trade deficit resulating as a direct consequence of largely U.S.-based programmers giving away their efforts for free.
And whose fault is that? If you're in a market where people will do it for free, you've picked the wrong market. Demand and supply. The free market. The american way. The anti-OSS movement are preaching protectionism and trade barriers, everything the US of A supposedly don't stand for.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But of course, MS is not charging US prices in Vietnam...
Furthermore, the relevant question is whether Windows XP is out of range for people who have computers. Vietnamese rice farmers are not going to run Windows XP.
Speaking of the MIT laptop - the next half-of-the-world-hardware-standard should be the next how-things-should-be-standard.
I have gone open source lately and by that I don't mean openoffice.org instead of MS-Office or gnome/kde instead of windows explorer, but I mean real gnu just how the unix culture intended it to be. I think it's ludicrous that people switch to a *nix and try to run it like a windows, that'd be too dumb and missing the point on unix. Windows may be good for dummies but people shouldn't be encouraged to remain dummies for decades, and open source shouldn't try to imitate that encouragement.
For example, any computer user worth his salt and intending to use a computer for longer than a couple of months should pretty soon be starting to learn how to use LaTeX, and use that instead of MSWord and Powerpoint especially that it's simpler and far better. Same can be said for project R and sqlite instead of Excel and Access - both are once known simpler and far better. Add Perl to that, and with CTAN, CRAN and CPAN, and within a few months I'd kick any MS user's ass with my $100 laptop. Those are simple things, teach them to high school kids, just the basics of them, no need for abstract deep stuff for large scale programming at this point, and I'm sure they'd pick them up more easily than I did.
My favourite stuff right now are stuff that I know for sure would run on the simplest hardware out there, be stable, fast and secure (no data loss or erros), and I don't need to worry about upgrading to what nonsense Mircosoft is trying to sell me next nor the hardware I need to run it.
Has it ever occured to you or anyone else that these people you are going to try to sell $100 laptops to have no use for a laptop, for MS Windows, or for open sourced?
Do you really think students there don't need a computer? There is a lot of IT students in these countries that would be happy to have a personnal computer. And there is already numberous contributions to FOSS coming from them already. Sometimes just localization, sometimes more. The point is not to give computers but to make them affordable.
Million Dollar Screenshot
Nowhere in the article does the author talk about "anti-Americanism."
Instead, the article is all about the positive reasons for other countries to use Linux, i.e. because it is cheaper, easier to localise, supports the local software industry, and so on.
It looks like the author was used and abused by his ZDnet editors.
Who the hell is going to buy a $100 laptop when they don't have enough to eat.
What does "developing countries" mean anyway...
Does anyone really think that a $100 laptop is going to improve the quality of life
for the vast majority in a "developing country"?
I cannot provide a citing OTTOMH, but IIRC, Microsoft has said they believe 1/3 of all Windows running today [worldwide] are pirated.
Some where, some how, they've gone to the same school as the oil executives sitting before Congress last week, attempting to justify their record quarterly profits, but claiming to have done so without gouging their customers: "We had to do it. Otherwise, there'd be a run on gas and it would have create shortages." Imagine them saying under their breath: "the fact we made a lot of money protecting people from themselves was just gravy" and their other friends saying, "smoking is not dangerous". Oil executives, tobacco executives, baseball players: is there anyone who doesn't lie before Congress?)
How many threads|entries [below] will it be before we see:
"Our software would be cheaper[1] if we didn't have to compensate for pirated copies." "We wouldn't pirate copies if they weren't so expensive." and "How can you say 100% of the people pirating would purchase a legitimate copy if they weren't so expensive?"
[1] Not "less expensive", "cheaper".
___________________________________
A new punchline for an old joke:
So the priest walks up to a nun and asks, "What's Windows?" She looks at him and says, "$10, just like everywhere else."
Corrupt capitalism is just as oppressive as corrupt socialism. To modify your "oh so poignant" point slightly:
Armchair capitalism is very nice until it is YOU who finds himself working 3 hours to earn enough to buy a loaf of bread.
It's not capitalism that makes the USA a good place to work. It's the fact that there are effective, independent courts that do a fairly good job of maintaining the rule of law. In more socialist countries where there is a similarly effective judiciary, you will find that the three hour lines you refer to don't exist. In fact, you'll find that society does a pretty decent job of allocating goods. Note, I'm talking about socialism here - not central planning. There is a BIG difference. Distinctions like that tend to be glossed over or completely lied about in the brainwashing that a some (a lot of?) American schoolchildren get.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
All of human progress including technology is characterized by a repeating cycle of exploration and simplification. I do think that Open Source software is a better way to make software but does not always result in better software. ;).
What I think is far more important than Open Source methodology is the setting of standards in the first place. Consider all of networking, it was formalized as a framework called OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) and was structured in such a way that it could be modularily extended with minimal disruption to other areas. Imagine what the Internet would be today without the OSI model. I think we would instead of a world wide system would be stuck for quite a few years with a mish-mash of protocols that wouldn't communicate well with each other. What I mean by that is there would be AOL networks, Microsoft networks, Sun networks, and so on and they would only communicate with each other through kludges at best. I don't see that situation as a healthy one at all. Now, given enough time everything clears up so eventually one(ish) networking standard would come to prevail but there would have been a lot more resources wasted to arrive at the equivalent point of a designed from the outset standard.
I don't think that very many people would disagree if I said that the Internet is an essential service and in many different ways that alone implies a need for regulation. Internet service is run as a free market right now and market forces are great at optimization of variables but are not intelligent and do not always do smart things (beta vs. vhs anyone?). What I'm trying to say is that governments should introduce new standards into the Internet, things that try to make it the most efficient and flexible Information conduit it can be. It's all about where you start and where you end, and with standards as a better starting point than random less effort is expended traveling to where we should be.
So where I'm going with all this is that the conflict between proprietary and open software vendors could be easier to resolve if regulations were established that in effect stated that all the pipes were going to be the same size so they would fit together. This is where the commons doesn't have to be a tragety, the removal of scarcity from the system does allow for "The Magic Cauldron" effect and that is where Open Source should be. Now, if all the basic information infrastucture is regulated, what does that leave for private enterprise? Content, baby, content. That's where all the real money is
Shh.
It's not TRADE if it's free. It's also not commerce. And that's what the US of A is built upon.
I assume you are arguing it is not trade if the item costs no money, not if the source is available as no one in their right mind would argue freedom is opposed to the U.S. founding principals. In which case, you're dead wrong anyway. Barter is a concept that predates money. People who use open source software, especially GNU software must agree to the license and abide by it's terms in exchange for the right to copy and redistribute it. In the case of the BSD license, all the user is asking for is credit, which is a form of advertising. In the case of GNU licensed materials the copyright holder(s) are demanding access to free labor from people who want to use it in particular ways. This is called trade.
It's been one of my favorite sayings for going on ten years, now: The technology that you do not master, will master you. What a shame that America won the space race, pioneered the computer race, and then lapsed into barbarism. Quite a shame; what a lead we lost. How glorious we could have been! Check the distros at DistroWatch.com sometime - a growing percentage of them are *NOT* in English! Many are tailer-made for a specific country or language other than the US.
Well, I'm glad I kept *my* hand in, instead of vegging on the couch watching football. As a second-generation immigrant myself, who taught himself eight programming languages and landed a string of tech jobs with nothing but a little vocational training paid for by his own job, don't expect me to be all sympathetic when the rest of the world leaves America behind. No one can bail you out of this mess, if you won't lift a finger to help yourself.
A mind is, indeed, a terrible thing to waste, and a person throwing away their mind on purpose wastes their life as well; an even greater tragedy. So I'll sign my rant off with deepest regrets...
From the article:
Even if software is discounted to account for local pricing, it is usually still extremely expensive and there is no guarantee that this discount will be sustained in the long term, says Ghosh.It also discusses the price of MS Windows on Amazon.com. This is a straw man. MS Windows is expensive, no doubt about it. But MS is not selling Windows in Vietnam for the same price that they are selling it for in the US. For that matter, few people in the US are paying the Amazon price!! Most folks get Windows preinstalled, and corporate volume licenses and the licenses that HP, Dell, etc. buy are certainly not the $99 or more that Windows costs on the Amazon website!
Windows is expensive, but this article is a total joke. How about giving us some real price data that those in other countries pay. Hell, how about giving us some real US price data!!!
Penny - plain text accounting
What is the point of these ads? Do Americans actually see an ad for some weird drug for low cholesterol, and for some reason believe they are more qualified than their doctor to decide if they need it? Who would do this?
I can't even fathom this amount of commercialism in medicine - it is wrong on so many levels I cannot even begin to explain. "Ask your Doctor about <insert drug here>. I have a better idea - why dont I assume that my doctor, who has trained for nearly a decade (and more), and who would probably have multiple orders of magnitude more information on me on my condition, would know best, and let them tell me if I need you drug., instead of listening to drug company propeganda?
I took his point to be that Computing, through mass-market rationalism, has become a highly modalised activity targeted at the lowest-common-denominator - one whose graphical interfaces (eg OSX, WinXP, KDE/GNOME) are strategically engineered to encourage certain use patterns and types based on theories of predictable action.
There is loss here for the curious user with no prior technical knowledge; s/he is discouraged from learning about, and then engaging with the actual computational processes offered by the powerful machines at their fingertips. OSX and Win32 are examples of these; highly generalised, tactically stupified, rental operating-systems whose product target is that of 'appliance', not 'computer'.
Comitting to a GNU toolchain and free-software operating-system can only encourage learning in directions not ordained within the rationalism of product driven capitalism. Many 30-somethings here grew up with comparitively 'unfriendly' computing machines (ZX84, Amstrad, C64, AppleIIE). We studied them inside and out. Let's not forget what contact with these machines gave us.. and be wary of this so called 'user friendliness'.
MS Windows and GUI's in general have allowed people who are experts in fields other than computer software to use computers and gain productivity.
While you are kicking the other guys butt he is making money by serving his customers or employers.
A lot of techies have worked very hard for very long to enable non-techies to benefit from computer automation and communications. Just as auto mechanics, designers, geologists and chemical engineers have worked long and hard to enable us to drive around in cars without knowing how to fix cars, refine oil, negotiate with Arabs or engineer mass production lines.
A good auto mechanic and expert driver may be able to drive around better, cheaper and faster than you can but you don't really care, you've got other things to do. That's how most of the world feels about us and they're right.
I18N == Intergalacticization
1. Not everyone is an expert.
2. Not everyone wants to be an expert in computers. (More important)
3. You cannot drag and drop a spreadsheet table into a LaTeX document.
4. You assume that those who are not interested in the same things that you are should be considered dumb because they favor a GUI.
5. OS X is an example of a GUI done better. GUI != Windows GUI. For reference, check out Quicksilver for OS X.
6. \documentstyle{letter} \begin{document} is not as easy as using a WYSIWYG word processor. Stop deluding yourself.
7. Do you make sure to wash only whites with whites, light colors with light colors, and darks with darks? Do you fold them neatly and ordered from dark to light? Do you put striped shirts in a different section from solids? Some would argue that just a little time spent up front can save you more time later when selecting an outfit for the day. Others will be impressed by your organization.
OR
Do you just not care enough to obsess about your clean laundry. Maybe you're like me and just fold it and throw it in a dresser. Maybe like me you wash white with "fairly light" on warm most of the time.
Different people care about different things. Perhaps LaTeX would be marginally more efficient than Word (after the initial training and cursing is over). But more likely, just like organizing your sock drawer; most people figure that they have better things to do.
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That said, you are unfortunately comparing apples to oranges. LaTeX is a replacement to the Word doc format, not Word.
*ring* *ring*
"Hello? Okay hold on, I'll get him. It's for you. It's the 1980's calling. They want their text processor back."
Now calm down. Do I think LaTeX (and its non-obvious pronounciation) should go away? No. Do I think many people use it through a GUI and not by typing in format/structure codes? Absolutely! I also hope you grasp the irony of someone advocating for better word processing methodology (text with formatting) in a Slashdot post with absolutely no formatting whatsoever. My god man! They're called "paragraph breaks."
What the hell is the point of a 3GHz processor if you're just going to use a text editor that only loads and saves? Then of course you have to pass it through a formatter/compiler so that you can have your nice PDF or graphic or what-have-you. But wait! You need to make a template too so that it looks presentable.
Forget that! I remember the days of writing ".pp" at the beginning of WordStar documents so that numbered page footers would appear from the dot matrix printer. I remember arcane commands like "^KD" for save and close. I occasionally type ":wq" in a console when I have to. I remember typing "CLOAD BJACK" on my father's Z80-processor Exidy Sorceror and pressing play on the tape deck so that I could get a couple hands of Blackjack in before bed. They were all things that I could learn, and they weren't all that complex.
I never want anything to do with them ever again. Why? Because I have better things to worry about than obscure technical arcana that has no relevance to the world at large or the task at hand. The only point in bringing it up and proclaiming that others do the same is to assert how clever you think you are and how you think every else will be made so much more clever if they do as you do.
If you really want people to use LaTeX, bundle it up in such a way that anyone -- not just those who have used computers for ten years or longer -- can use it out of the box with only a ten-minute tutorial. Go ahead. I dare you. A word of advice: don't start the tutorial with "all you have to do is format it like '
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
"Has it ever occured to you or anyone else that these people you are going to try to sell $100 laptops to have no use for a laptop, for MS Windows, or for open sourced?"
Yes, it has occurred to me. So I went and checked. I didn't just ask people 'Do you want a cheap computer?', I spent a year travelling through a developing country assessing their priority needs. I spent another year setting up community-owned computer centres where people can use computers for about a dollar an hour. There are full every minute of the day. One computer centre has 4 computers and over 250 students signed up for this term alone. The service is expensive for them, but they love it. I'm currently working on another project to replicate this effort throughout the South Pacific.
Unfortunately, a lot of people fall victim to the same kind of binary logic that you use above. Since when does buying farm implements or providing food aid preclude spending a few dollars on education and employment opportunities? Is it absolutely unimaginable that we could do both?
"If you GAVE it to them, they would sell it for $60 to buy some better farming equipment or some shoes for their kids."
Bull. Selling a computer is like selling the milk cow. You're sacrificing your (and your children's) future for quick profit today. Although every society the world over has its own quota of short-sighted people, I can tell you from personal experience that inexpensive computers have value, and they improve living conditions where they are available. I can also tell you from direct experience that most people recognise this and are committed to their children's future.
Do you know what the number one spending priority is in the developing country where I live? It's school fees. Every single parent I've spoken with cares about nothing more than ensuring a better future for their children. Many parents hold public fund-raisers on behalf of their children in order to keep them in school. Living a life of abject poverty does not mean that people aren't capable of forgoing immediate gratification in favour of a better long-term solution.
I won't deny for a second that every society has its share of short-sighted people who want flashy new toys without really considering their worth or the cost of owning and using something as sophisticated as a computer. But that's where volunteers like me and the dozens of other working here come in. I've been training unemployed youth in computer repair, maintenance and configuration. They're now earning a modest but viable living providing support services to others. One of them is training the next group of apprentices, too.
There is nothing more important to learning than access to information and the time to study it. Having a computer in the home makes both of those available. I can say from experience that this laptop initiative is enlightened and will almost certainly have a direct and positive effect on the lives of the recipients.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.