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Open Source's Battle In Africa
eldavojohn writes "The BBC has more details about something we last discussed in 2008 — the showdown of open source versus proprietary software in Africa. When discussing the issue of cost, the piece quotes Microsoft's chairman on the scene, Dr. Cheikh Modibo Diarra, who alludes that open source continually costs you money by saying 'You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.' On the other end of the story is Ken Banks from Kiwanja.net who has spent 15 years developing open source applications in Africa. His logic is that 'Today we're seeing growing open-source programmer, developer communities in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries. Clearly, if you have this informal programming sector coming up, access to source code is almost critical if they are going to be able to take advantage of these new tools that are emerging.' Well, the battle rages on, hopefully the emerging African developers and users pick the tool(s) that suit their needs the best."
Its great that you can get a linux update every day just about, thats neat and cool when you're sitting in dad's basement bored and lonely on a Friday night. You have fun updating your box. I on the other hand will do something else because I'm not constantly tracking changes and praying to god that those changes don't break something in the process.
When you say "doing something else", you do of course mean "being acquired by a botnet through a security hole that hasn't been patched because you don't like to do pesky updates", correct?
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Dr. Cheikh Modibo Diarra, who alludes that open source continually costs you money by saying 'You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.'
Look, I'm no Linux fanboy*. But Ubuntu is not only free-as-in-beer, not only more stable, not only more powerful but there's a whole community who's idea of recreation is waiting for people like my 50-something friend I installed the distribution for to help with any problems he might have.
Like... Holy Christ, they charge you for new versions of their OS, in complete and outright, obvious contradiction of the quote above. In what way is there even a competition there?
*Disclaimer: I am. But you should take me seriously anyway.
Property is theft.