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

Re:It's an opportunity for everyone

[synthespian]

Everybody wins: your organization gets something it may not have gotten before; money stays in the local economy; the community around that product benefits (if changes are contributed back); and so on.

Personally, I don't think the GPL is the answer. This is a mistake that is being replicated all over, due to the FSF world tour advocating the GPL, and the hype that the press creates. That license has only worked in practice for: 1) big hardware companies that really, are selling hardware, not Linux; 2) companies that use the GPL to dual-license (there are som many today - from Eiffel maker ISE, to MySQL, etc., etc.); 3) Ship products with lousy documentation then sell "support." Not only that, any serious GPLed project asks one to let go their copyright over code to the project. By having this loophole for dual-licenses, what you are effectively doing is allowing a third-party to get rich off your work.

Using a GPL-only approach in a business arena where big companies have huge IT departments is near suicidal. It's 2006 and by now we've all seen that the support model only works in a handfull of cases. We're talking about contries that have business-unfriendly environments and fragile legal systems (*). To pitch your little firm that sells support against a huge multinational with a huge IT department doesn't seem smart. And we're talking countries where those companies may exert more than pressure. Rather, pre$$ure is what they do (**)

The BSD license would be the best license in that arena: it allows optimizations of resources through code sharing, whereby mainting different patchsets becomes to costly, and also allows you to keep ahead of the competition. And I'm not claiming the BSD license only is adequate vis-à-vis the GPL, but any license that allows mingling with proprietary software, by the way. Is it any wonder that projects like GNOME use the LGPL, and GNOME is supported by industry, while (the better, IMHO) KDE is not? Is it a coincidence that JBOSS, Mozilla, and Apache don't use the GPL? Does the GPL keep people away? It sure looks that way. In the GNU/Linux ambiance, the GPL may even make sense, since one part of the system is from the GNU project - hence the FSF, and the other part is a kernel. But does it make sense for everybody to use the GPL? Does is make sense for, e.g., business software? What about when you need deeper integration on a deeper level? What about when you need system-level hacking for your business?

I see it as purely stupid getting in some market niches - say, e.g., embedded OS - with a promise to give code away. Remember, we're talking about countries where even the legal system - conceding there's a minimum legal framework - may not secure developer's rights. Or take too long to do it.

In developing countries, there's a huge installed base of Microsoft and other proprietary solutions. There's little Free Unix culture like in the U.S. By having licenses that are not business-friendly, developing countries are shutting themselves out of a huge market for integration with existing software.

And let's not forget the emtpy promises... Can anyone name contributors from developing countries that used government research money for development of truly big things, like GNOME, C#, KDE, the Linux kernel, protocols, etc. ? So, for all the hype governments such as Brazil or Spain (Spain not being a developing country, of course) creates, we have yet to see substantial contributions. As of now, all there is is a bunch of sysadmins with "connections" striking contracts with governments for Linux deployment.

The important thing is to be able to share code freely, with guaranteed rights, including the right to make money off you work. "To get rich is glorious" - Deng Xiaoping

(*) (for instance, it takes 180 days to open a business in Brazil. It takes 2 days in Florida. It takes 10 years to close your shop in Brazil)
(**) (example: Brazil's Amazon Radar Surveilance system: against *all* recommendations, from congress to technical bodies analyzing the issue Raytheon - famous for its DOD contracts - won the deal).