[Fsf-friends] Free Software notes ... by Niklas Vainio (Finland)

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

http://hiisi.fi/blog/post/2005/02/18/linux-asia-2005/

2005/2/18
Linux Asia 2005
Filed under:

* Free Software

-- Niklas Vainio @ 13:49

...

First day was on Linux on desktop and support. Professor Deepak Phatak gave 
some interesting figures. In India, there are 7 PCs per 1000 citizens, in China 
that is 37 per 1000. Average price of computer is now 30 000-40 000 Rs. First 
500 million computers are in the developed world, the next 500 million should 
come from Asia and Africa. To make that possible, there should be more 
investments in India and the cost of computer, including software should drop 
to 1/4th of current, i.e. to 10 000 Rs. At the moment, India is a "net taker" 
in the open source movement, but in few years it should become a "net giver". 
Dr. Phatak is currently running a program to get computer science students 
involved in open source development.

Matthew Szulik of Red Hat said basically that customers don't want operating 
systems, they want solutions and that Red Hat doesn't sell operating systems, 
it sells subscriptions. Ju"rgen Geck of Novell SUSE had an interesting parallel 
of the early history of automobile industry. Henry Ford didn't only invent the 
assembly line, he also created open standards - standard screws, bolts etc.

Second day was about storage and high performance computing. I was getting flu 
and wasn't so interested in the topic so I skipped most of the day.

Third day was the most interesting for me. Jitendra Shah spoke about his 
Janabhaaraati Live CD with localized software. He said a couple of things I 
hadn't thought about the use of IT in government offices. For government use, 
you need: Indian language support, office tools, printing, network, 
communication utilities, document management, search in Indian languages, name 
translitteration, GIS and low-cost support (can IBM/Red Hat/Novell do that?).

The most interesting session was an ad-hoc session right after the official 
program about why Open Source still hasn't gotten off in India yet. This 
session had the most discussion and argumentation, about piracy vs. free 
software etc. Somebody from the audience criticized David Axmark (of MySQL) 
that it's easy for him to develop software and give it away since he's from a 
social democracy. On one hand it's very true that FLOSS has hidden assumptions 
on the background of the free software hacker. A large part of free software is 
software somebody wrote on their free time. Not everybody can afford that. On 
the other hand, freedom of the software is part of the strategy of MySQL - it 
wouldn't have become so great piece of software if it hasn't been free. Same 
applies to Linux, gcc, KDE, Firefox and many others.

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