OSS Provides Opportunity, Challenge for Developing World

NewsForge has an interesting article looking at open source in the developing world. From the article: " Open source software and development can push governments of developing nations ahead in the world, but only if they participate as producers of the technology themselves, United Nations University (UNU) researchers say. While they say developing regions such as China, East Asia, India, and South America are among the biggest markets for open source software, UNU officials worry that there may be too few open source developers in those regions."

Comments

Well it's definitely empowering...

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

I travel and I travel a lot: 40 countries so far and the one thing that frustrates me to no end are American swho think that bringing technology to the world is a bad thing. They suffer from a mentality that the grass is greener...

Not doing what we can to empower folks in impoverished countries only serves to keep them down. Maybe, just maybe they can (no closed sourced pun intended) excel and achieve great things if they just had the tools. Before the technology boom the concept of outsourcing anything to India was unheard of for example. It's not empowering EVERYONE but India is definitely becoming a powerhouse. I know small businesses who outsource to Ukraine and Azerbaijan now.

Closed source by it's very expensive nature only serves to keep people down.

Re:Well it's definitely empowering...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Life is about competition and survival. The only thing that makes us (which applies to any group you might be in) BETTER is that the other guys are WORSE.

You know, for most of human history, most people -- or at least most nations -- believed exactly that. The result was a never-ending race to the bottom, constant squabbling, cruelty on a vast scale; societies where humanity managed, briefly, to rise above the muck, such as the height of Rome, were inevitably brought down and buried by barbarians who saw their (relative) wealth and could conceive of no other path than to try to steal it.

This really didn't change until the late 18th c., at which point people started realizing, however dimly, that wealth is not a zero-sum game, that there were points of stable equilibrium above the combination of crushing power and grinding poverty. And to be sure, the ramifications took a long time to work out. Liberty, equality, fraternity turned into the Reign of Terror and the conquests of Napoleon; aggressive colonial expansion shattered ancient cultures and all too often led to outright genocide; the US required a Civil War to do away with its remaining Old Wolrd aristocracy; Britannia's rule of the waves may have been largely benign, but it was bought with sword and flame; last and worst, the grotesque auto-da-fe of World War One and the long shadow it cast on the twentieth century, including World War Two and the Cold War, serve to remind us that we're not done yet.

But -- the fact of the matter is that on average, life is better, for more people, all over the world, than it has ever been before. And this is not because we have managed to take from others, but because we have built for ourselves. Competition, yes, but competition according to a set of rules, with the understanding that there can be more than one winner. Survival, yes, but with a recognition that we can do more than simply survive.

Welcome to the modern world. Look around, take in the sights. You'll probably see some things that will shock you, and other things it will be hard for you to understand at first, but once you get used to how things work around here, I think you'll enjoy your stay.

Not so lame excuse

[Harmonious Botch]

A large middle class with significant 'spare time' is a particularly recent, western, first-world phenomenom. In third world countries, most people - except for the aristocracy - just don't have much spare time.
Forty hours per week? Until the US became industrialized in the late 1800s, most people worked 10-12 per day 6+ days per week.

Re:WTF? - FTA

[slashflood]

"That is a mindset that should be discouraged from being advocated."

I don't get it. You ripped this line out of its context. Let me get it back in:

"Open source is not the poor man's Windows, [t]hat is a mindset that should be discouraged from being advocated."

Translated: "You don't use Open Source, just because it is cheaper than Windows. There are other reasons."

And fair trade, too

[Flying pig]

At the moment software is frequently a tax that poor countries pay to rich countries to be allowed to participate. Poor countries often have weak currencies, but the local cost of goods and services is much lower than you would expect from the exchange rate. It's like living at the top of an economic inverted gravity well; moving around the local maximum is not too hard, but bringing things in from outside is difficult. Any goods that have to be bought in the West are relatively speaking very expensive. Since the major desktop and server OS is produced in a small corner of the US, this represents a tax on international trade, applied to the Third World and with the proceeds going to Redmond.

FOSS means that work, whether localisation or support, can be done in the local region at local prices. It therefore levels the playing field, helping to achieve the (supposed) objectives of the WTO. And, in reality, it doesn't reduce Microsoft's profits as much as you might think because, in many cases, the alternative is actually piracy.

On the other hand, it creates middle class jobs (jobs relying on literacy, professional skills etc.). The biggest problem of many Third World countries is the lack of a middle class. Between the very poor (exploited) and the very rick (exploiters) there is no buffer of people to create a civil society. In China the very concept of civil society is still alien while it has emerged rapidly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. India has a rapidly increasing middle class and is the world's biggest democracy.

So, I know this may seem over the top: but FOSS provides support to fair trade, emerging democracy and free markets. And it does it while expending very little energy, so it contributes little to climate change.

Some perspective

[AfricanImpi]

First of all, let's stop the stereotyping. The "developing world" is huge and extremely diverse, containing countries as comparatively wealthy and advanced as South Africa as well as underdeveloped and poor countries like Mozambique. To suggest, as some have here, that "nobody in the developing world has free time", or "few people have access to electricity" or my personal favourite of "people in the developing world have more pressing needs, such as food and water", is of course ludicrous. To those making such arguments, please do us all a favour and educate yourselves.

Programming is essentially a product of enthusiasm, as many of those reading Slashdot will probably know. In this, it is similar to becoming a pilot. Every single programmer I know began programming purely out of interest, and a desire to do more with their computers and explore the boundaries of what was possible. Not all programmers go on to make it their careers though, just as not all of those who dream of flying as kids end up as pilots. However, when the demand is there, people become encouraged to turn their hobby or interest into a career, and do so. The thing to remember here is that programmers are not created, and you cannot shove out some govt program that will result in a couple hundred programmers emerging by the end of the year. Instead, it's about giving youths access to computers (say at school) and teaching them the healthy curiousity and ambition that results in them trying to do more than the usual.

Currently, the emergence of programmers in the developing world is hampered by a lack of widespread access to quick and cheap internet, and a lack of access to computers. Yet this is slowly changing, and it really can only get better as both internet access and computing become irrevocably cheaper every year. Indeed, if there are already enough skilled software programmers in India to throw half of Slashdot's contributors into a protectionist rage every so often, then you know things are looking up in the developing world.

This article, and others like it, is interesting but ultimately misguided. The choice here is not an absolutist one between open source and proprietary software, as both have their place, and nor is there any way to magically create programmers. Instead, the attention that is being focused on the supposed lack of programmers such instead be focused on pressuring the governments of the developing world to liberalise their markets, drop tariffs, and generally increases the level of freedom available to their people, so that those with the curiousity to try new things will be able to do so without hindrance.