Just 10 days ago, 130 million brazilian voters were turned into users of one of the largest Linux deployment worldwide: the 400,000 electoral sections in all of the 5,563 brazilian municipalities were running electronic voting machines, and the Linux kernel was running in all of them.
Schools in America are held hostage by Microsoft and are being choked one school at a time. We have allowed Microsoft and our State and Federal governments to force us into financing cycles that schools cannot afford.
Imagine you are the minister of education of an impoverished country, with a limited budget to improve your schooling system. You realize the importance of computers in education, and also realize that failing to provide a proper IT infrastructure to your country’s youth would have a grave effect on your country for generations. You are not aware of such thing called “Open Source” what would happen? You would probably end up spending thousands on software to equip your school’s computers, and with the budget constraint, you will roll out only a fraction of the computers actually needed. This would put you in front of two options; either some schools get computers, or cramp 10 children in front of one computer.
Compare this to Ubuntu Linux, which ships on Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbooks, among others. Ubuntu issues a major update every six months, and it guarantees support for each of these releases for at least 18 months. And unlike the XP-Vista upgrade path, it's safe to assume that an Ubuntu update won't instantly turn a perfectly serviceable PC into an overpriced space heater.
However, the Linux netbook genre received a boost this week when Dell started running its first major advertisements about a Linux-based system. According to a story from The VAR Guy, Dell started running multi-page newspaper ads specifically hawking its first Linux netbook, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (pictured).
Code is cheap. But even in writing and speech, there is definitely a producer and a consumer. Those are the two sides of every known business model.
