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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."
Let me tell you about the so called "sense of community" South American countries are purported to have.
"Sense of Community" is another way of saying "Well, you see, the puppet government over here is run by a bunch of army generals ready to put tanks on the streets at the slightest sign of uprising. The economy is in shambles even though we have vast amounts of silver, uranium, gold and oil since no one is crazy enough to establish a firm that requires bribing 7 levels of bureaucrats and has a 50% chance of being nationalized by the government. Thats why all people not directly involved with the ruling Mafia are poor as fuck and tend to help each other out since they simply wouldn't survive any other way"
Armchair socialism is very nice until it is YOU who finds himself waiting 3 hours in line for a loaf of bread. No amount of Linux distro's is gonna change that. In the US all it took was a few exceptional men with a strong sense of the common secular good - individualism, freedom of speech, right to life and property, checks and balances. They could have drafted the constitution otherwise...no one would have stopped them, you know.
No, wait!
Some bald fat man from Microsoft said that DRM is the future.
And what's the use of an opensourced DRM rootkit?
I disagree. A GUI is good to get you using the computer if you've never touched one. But for someone to use a computer for longer than a couple of months then I really do think that learning something more reliable and flexible is a better option if they intend to use a computer for life. I know this from personal experience because I have used a GUI for ~20 years now, become 'expert' at using MS software over this time, and consider much of those 20 years a waste of time already. It's okay to start off as a dummy, but it's pretty friggin' dumb to stay a dummy for the rest of your days. It took me little time to read some LaTeX tutorials, and I do know for sure and without a doubt that dealing with LaTeX is a much better option for me than dealing with why MS Word screws up my bulleted lists on regular basis or whether I should worry about changes to formatting resulting from using MS Word documents between version of MSOffice, OpenOffice.org, Macintosh, PocketPC and Palm or even if my platoform of choice or convenience can handle MS Office documents. None of that is a concern with LaTeX thanks to the plaintext file format that'll work on any device and I don't need to even worry about formatting seeing how LaTeX handles it all. I also don't find anything friggin impossible or even difficult about "\documentstyle{letter} \begin{document} ... letters ... \end{document}", in fact, it's simpler and faster than messing with MSWord.
I think it's ludicrous that kids learn MSWord in schools and stay with it. I think it's ludicrous that business run on MSWord. LaTeX could do all those trivial things and much, much better.
Same is for much else in the "Unix Culture". The day Unix become about no more than being a GUIfied windows-like-dumbness is the day I think it would lose anything of significance that makes it better than windows.