[FSF India] Re: Lessons from the Mexican School Experiment

[Vivekananda Prabhu]

Dear RMS,

I am *not* promoting non-free drivers, be they Windows
or Linux drivers.

I don't know whether you are aware of the PC scenario
in India. In India less than 5% of the population have
PCs at home. Of these atleast 75%-80% of the PCs are
assembled PCs (grey market).The reason for this is the
price difference between Branded & assembled PCs. If a
branded PC costs Rs 70-80K (unless there is a
clearance sale), an assembled one costs around Rs
30K-40K.

Most of these grey market vendors use non-standard
hardware manufactured in China, Singapore, Malaysia,
Taiwan etc. Most of these hardware come only with
Windows drivers. On many PCs it is simply not possible
to install & run any OS other than Windows

If Free Software movement intends to be successful in
India there are only 2 options

1)Identify each such hardware (there are a legion of
them) & write Free drivers for each one of them
(atleast most of them)

2)Support Windows drivers

If option (2) is not acceptable to FSF & FSFI then it
should immediately work on option (1)

This is *urgent* as PC scenario is going to change
drastically in India very soon. By 2005 Indian govt.
has to reduce import duties on PC hardware due to WTO
obligations.There is also tremendous pressure from
Indian IT companies.Once the PC prices fall, PCs will
become affordable to most average urban Indians. Most
will go with assembled PCs as they would still be
cheaper than Branded PCs( the grey market doesn't pay
any taxes to govt.)

If people find they cannot run GNU/Linux on these PCs
they will switch over to pirated versions of Windows
(around 70% of software in India is pirated)

If FSFI has to cash-in on this window of opportunity
to promote Free Software usage it has to act fast &
act *now*

Otherwise Free software in India will just remain a
research area for scientists & hackers

Regards,
Vivek

--- Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> No matter what practical advantages there might seem
> to be, the FSF
> cannot advocate the use of any non-free programs
> without contradicting
> its basic principles.
> 
> There are thousands of others in our community who
> are ready to
> compromise these principles, or who simply do not
> choose to regard the
> matter as one of principle.  They will certainly
> tell users about
> non-free drivers, but we can't expect them to tell
> users there is
> something wrong with non-free drivers.  That is the
> FSF's job: to
> remind people of the principles that the rest of our
> community tends
> to forget.


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