As an advocate for free, open-source software, I have run into Microsoft's "battles" many times, and your article ("Microsoft Battles Low-Cost Rival for Africa," page one, Oct. 28) made visible many of the issues around money-poor African nations being wooed by a large, powerful monopoly.
However, your article doesn't go into the deeper value of using FOSS in Africa. Because FOSS supplies the source code for the software used, end users have the choice of using the software as it exists on the Internet or changing the software to meet their needs. Getting security fixes for software running on older systems (a natural need when you make $3 a day), changing the software to support your native language (not everyone speaks English), getting ancient peripherals to work long after the vendor lost interest in them (usually less than a year after the product ships), and developing a software economy in their own economic terms (creating high-tech jobs inside of their countries, instead of sending the money out of their countries) are all things that should be considered in the argument of free versus closed-source software.
The public should ask how a company like Microsoft can continue to justify to their shareholders creating needed changes to their software for people who can't pay for those changes? The answer is that they can't justify it. In the future they will have to either start charging for the software on which people are now dependent or abandon the effort.
The Linux thing always gets my motor running - I especially like it running for free.
Linux is evolving into a great platform and the odds are probably stacked towards some flavour of Linux being a dominant O/S of the future.
The average user of the Android-based G1 phone has downloaded 14 applications, out of 200 now available on the Android Marketplace, a Google executive said Wednesday.
MICROSOFT boss Steve Ballmer has made fun of Google's mobile operating system at the Telstra Investor Day conference in Sydney today.
Japanese embedded Linux house Lineo has announced a quick-start technology that it claims can boot Linux in 2.97 seconds on a low-powered system. The technology appears similar to but much faster than Linux's existing "suspend-to-disk" capability.
That's why people can reconcile themselves to using an operating system where you click on Start in order to shut the system down.
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Once again, I don't know what distribution refused to communicate with Davey. Every time I put in an USB key in my AMD64 box, a little dialgoue box pops up asking me what I would like to do and giving me three or four choices. When I pop in a DVD, VLC comes up and plays it. Let me be honest, I would much rather do this manually but that's the control freak in me speaking.
There is an impression that Windows comes configured out of the box to do many things. As someone who is called on to build grey boxes twice or thrice a year and install and configure Windows for friends, let me assure you that this is far from the truth.
Red Hat has announced the expansion of its international presence with the opening of an office in Dubai. The new office will provide support for its growing customer base in the Middle East and Africa and enable Red Hat to leverage experts with local knowledge to meet new business demands in the region.
A guide to making the right choice for your environment
It would be a bit of a stretch to claim that Barack Obama won the 2008 election because his website ran open source software while John McCain's ran on proprietary software. But what is not a stretch at all is that Barack Obama's campaign built a powerful synergy between grass-roots politics and grass-roots technology, while presenting what many consider to be the most disciplined campaign of any candidate in modern history.
Rishab Ghosh, who presented the guidelines at the Open Source World Conference in Malaga, argued that the procurement guidelines were needed because of two reasons. First, they studied recent tenders and found that many explicitly mentioned proprietary applications. 16% of 3615 software tenders explicitly asked for products from top 10 software vendors, such as Microsoft, SAP and Oracle. This practice may be illegal because public tenders generally have to describe functional requirements in a general way instead of specifying specific products. Second, many public administrations don't have any experience with the procurement of FOSS. In fact, they often don't know whether or under which circumstances they are allowed to adopt and ask for FOSS solutions. The guidelines are specifically designed in order to clearly and simply explain how public administrations can acquire open source and they don't assume that a country has adopted a specific policy regarding open source.
