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."

Comments

Misleading statement

[downix]

Dr Cheikh Modibo Diarra, stated 'You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.' This is very misleading, as the "cost" is a combination of this, plus the support. You are then at the mercy of Microsofts schedule for repairs, updates, and if they consider your problem worth the effort to correct. This can be very costly in direct dollars in downtime and productivity. I can imagine an office going down due to a language package error, actually I don't have to. I have seen a language pack that broke an entire office due to a system update which was incompatible with some element within. And you then sit waiting for a week for someone, somewhere to apply a fix. This is not an issue with open source, as you then have access to every bit of the system, including the source code. A weeks downtime, for a "one time cost" or back up in an hour for a variable cost, your choice.