The powerful appeal of something for nothing (Financial Times) [LWN.net]

The powerful appeal of something for nothing (Financial Times)

Posted Mar 29, 2006 20:14 UTC (Wed) by Stavros (guest, #36829)
In reply to: The powerful appeal of something for nothing (Financial Times) by quintesse
Parent article: The powerful appeal of something for nothing (Financial Times)

"It is? I would say that getting something for free and then being able to
adjust it to suit your purposes would be a powerful incentive to consider
working on OSS."

An even more fundamental incentive: developing nations are using open source, so experience with open source is more valuable than experience with closed source like Windows. If end user licences for proprietary software are already too expensive there is no way companies in developing nations will be able to pay for developer licences, or even be able to deal with the security infratructure that NDAs will impose.

Most people want a good job without travelling half way around the world for it. Whatever skills are needed for local jobs are the skills that people will try to acquire. In the U.S. you need to be able to work with Windows because all the businesses are already using it. If the governments in the developing world are using open source you need to be able to work with those tools.

To me the most encouraging comment in the article is:

"For many in the OSS community, the developing world is their natural territory - a place where proprietary alternatives such as Microsoft have not yet established a grip, [...]"

This is a place where we're starting on a level playing field, rather than battling uphill against an entrenched competitor. It will be very interesting to see how things evolve.

-- Stavros

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Something for nothing, or community effort?

Posted Mar 29, 2006 20:58 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

It seems people from the first world sometimes think of developing countries as a savannah where you have to pedal to generate the electricity for the computer, and use smoke signals for wireless internet connection.

I now live in Brazil, and am originally from Europe. I can tell you that we have very high technology here! And we do develop software for our needs that we then release under (L)GPL. Check for things like TerraLib.

Also, loads of this type of countries (India, China, Brazil, ...) have a higher-than-you-may-think level of education, and when students use GNU/Linux at Uni, they tend to use their spare time developing for it rather than for other OS's. Example: the 2.4 series of the Linux kernel is maintained by a Brazilian (olá Marcelo!).