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KDE Desktops For 52 Million Students In Brazil
An anonymous reader writes "Mauricio Piacentini writes about a deployment of systems running Linux and KDE in Brazil's schools; some 52 million students are to be served by this initiative. 'What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools. The software installed on these systems is "Linux Educacional 2.0," a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project.' The distro comes in Portuguese only at this time." quarterbuck notes that Linux is making other inroads in the BRIC economies (Brazil-Russia-India-China): India and China are getting a custom-designed Ubuntu laptop from Dell, and Russia is making their own Ubuntu laptop this year.
I have always said that using Open Source in government schools and other offices makes complete sense. Specially if they are not inside the USA.
My reasoning is that, as a tax payer in say, Brazil. I know that part of my taxes are going into buying whatever I.T. infrastructure is needed for the government (and there are countries and states where the government is *the* most important economy).
Therefore, as a tax payer, I prefer my contribution to go to Open Source projects (say, for example Open Office), which I would be able to use, instead of having to pay the proprietary software (Microsoft Office in this case) and giving that money to other countries (to the USA in such case).
Governments should mandate that all the software that is used in the government must be Open Source. The money with which the software is being bought is the money of all the contributors, and is in their best benefit to put that money in open standards, but most importantly in technology that *they* will be able to use.
Unfortunately, strong forces at the top of the governments impede such thing (at least in my own country) where big corporations push governments with "discrete" bribes in order to make them adopt whatever closed technology they sell.
It seems that the countries that will adopt Open Source as common initiative are the ones where socialism is not seen as such as scary term, akin to communism. And even the word communism does not equate to "Russian soviet slaves". Unlike USA and other countries that are *very* influenced by Capitalism.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Apple is getting the high margin users that want a good desktop experience, and Linux is getting more and more users that need good value deals.
Microsoft is in the middle, giving up market share on both sides.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
say what you will, but remember, while these children are not getting the best of linux, they are getting linux experience. Using , linux I've made more friendships and awesome contacts than I ever thought possible. I've had people let me into their homes, knowing very little about me, besides the fact that I was going to help them uninstall microsoft. They knew nothing of linux. Many times linux gave me strange problems with hardware issues. By having them sit with me while I checked the community for help, they saw what I saw: Computer users coming together as a community. This feeling that we shared is now available for 36 million school aged children? No matter what anyone says of the distro, the number of children, or anything else, these children are now given access to the one educational precept that will guide them for the rest of their lives. Each one teach one. The community will only spread with these types of initiatives. Someday, you may see them posting on slashdot, praising that initial step as the reason they went on to higher education. You may see them on IRC, helping one of our own. You may yawn, and this is ill advised. You see, when initiatives such as this arrise, it is up to all of us to collectively stand, and applaud.
If the numbers in TFA are true (36 million students, growing to 52 million by the end of 2009), then this is absolutely huge in terms of Linux install base. In fact, I think this project would approximately double the install base.
I know that "counting" the number of Linux installs is essentially impossible, but here are some random numbers I've accumulated that point to the approximate size of the Linux user base:
1. The Linux Counter estimated 29 million installs in 2005. This estimate involved numerous assumptions, such as extrapolating from 8 million installs reported by Red Hat in 1998.
2. According to an IDC study, the Linux marketshare for PCs was ~3% in 2003.
3. There are about 1 billion Internet users. Browser logs indicate that Linux accounts for ~0.8% to ~3.9% of web traffic. This gives us an estimate of 8 million to 39 million Linux users. (The upper estimate is undoubtedly an over-estimate since the value comes from W3Schools, which probably has a greater fraction of 'technical' users.)
4. According to Canonical's server logs from OS updates, there are approximately 6 million active users of Ubuntu (see here and here). Assuming that Ubuntu represents 30% of Linux usage (based on this), you can come up with an estimate of 20 million Linux users.
5. According to Fedora's logs for OS updates, there are approximately 2.8 million installations of Fedora Core 6, and 1.6 million of Fedora 7. Assuming Fedora represents 9% of Linux installs (again, based on this), you can estimate 48 million Linux users.
Obviously all of these methods have their own problems. I'm not claiming that any of these estimates are robust. However they do at least suggest a range for the number of Linux users (~20 million) and the marketshare of Linux (~1% to 2%).
So, this single project, it would seem, is drastically increasing (doubling?) Linux usage. This is huge, in my opinion, because a generation of students who have learned Linux will be far more likely to use and improve upon FLOSS when they enter the job market.