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."
That's why the $100 MIT Laptop makes sense: It's "cheap" for developing countries. Any *serious* developer should have one on hist desk just to see how his applications perform on the next half-of-the-world-hardware-standard.
mootion.com - Never underestimate VCs stock options (was: Web 2.0)
or a sentence; open Source is the future, it's inevitable.
Windows XP - Indian Rupees ~8,000 (average pay for an IT worker per month). Equivalent US$ 5,000. Office XP - Indian Rupees ~15,000 Eq US$ 9,000.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
In the pharma industry, prices in the US are much higher than overseas. In other countries governments regulate prices to some degree to keep them low. Socialized medicine won't tolerate the US prices. In the US we basically subsidise the large costs of Research and Development, clinical trials, etc. I wonder if the software market could handle this - pricing variation by country for the same items? The problem for MS and others is that unless they do this, they're driving other countries to either steal or to open-source software. Of course, that may not be a bad thing!
I doubt that pricing is a factor in third world countries. Since they can't afford the prices anyway, but have to communicate with the rest of the world, the majority will using pirated copies of Windows. MS is probably well aware of this, and that is the reason why the local versions for these countries are also localized in the pricing. What these countries value though, is also the independence, which is the really galling thing for the US. Linux doesn't have a stron relation to a particular country, and if it ever will get one, then there is no big problem. You got the source, you can change it and develop it however you wish. When you start out with a mostly new infrostructure you don't need to think about existing ties, because there are none. So it's cheaper and more reliable to code the appropriate converters for like Word dcouments, then taking the whole OS just to get this stuff, and have the extra advatnages for free.
And you know this to be true because????? ... people in developing countries don't care about licensing cost because there are minimal infrastructures to enforce them.
Well it's obvious you're not a "Word prolific". Use Word for a long enough period of time as I had done, save a document a few times and load it, let it have any significant outline-like bulleted list with some indentation, and see how often it screws up the thing. I don't need to convince *any* friggin' one what's easier or harder, I have used Word for long enough and I have, not long ago, started using LaTeX. I don't need to convince *any* friggin' one, all I need is to know which is simpler and wiser *for me* to use over a long period of time and the answer is there's no contest, LaTeX wins, it's far more portable, cross-platform, secure, stable, simple, *automatic* (yes, I don't need to worry about formatting or such nonsense, it's done by LaTeX to a professional quality, and this is an opinion that *not* only I hold, by far).
As for my children, I sure hope they won't expect to know how to drive a car after a "ten-minute tutorial", or expect that any other thing that they'd use for life is worth *no* more than ten minutes of learning time - if they do, then I'll consider myself a failure of a parent for having raised such instant gratification junkies who think that life is akin to a TV remote.