<incom> consumers of the future

[Frederick Noronha]

"Too costly" in what sense? In the context of initial investment?

This is an interesting perspective from Anriette Esterhuysen,
executive director of the Association for Progressive Communications
(APC): "Piracy creates jobs but free and open source software and open
standards create opportunity and entrepreneurs."

Going beyond that, I think FLOSS creates sustainable skills,
going-beyond-cyber-coolies possibilities, an understanding to look
deeply deeply "beneath the hood" and understand the  innards of the
technology.

We've spent quite some time in the past 4-5 years attempting to
scale-up the access to Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) in
India. See http://wikiwikiweb.de/LugsList
And, in hind-sight, it would seem that every minute of it was worth
it. Initially, it's a tough, uphill struggle. Once a bit of the
critical mass is built, it's near-magic as skills keep on growing and
replicating on their own. We still do need to find more scalable and
cost-effective ways of building skills though. But because of its
"openness" and "freedom", getting access to FLOSS is far, far easier.
Subscribing to foreign technology (and, we even have an Indian
magazine now in http://www.linuxforu.com/ is appears to be one nice
way of doign so.

FN

On 20/04/07, Steve Cisler <sacisler at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This has been going on officially in Latin America for
> several years. A group that provides support for
> telecenters in the region has supported this program
> by Microsoft (perhaps just a regional office program)
> and also Linux--at no charge. Telecenters usually
> would go for the cheapest solution and that was either
> pirated goods or Linux. However, many places found
> Linux support too high and welcomed the legal/cheap MS
> products.  I know that in Ecuador MS office did
> provide pretty good support for the product, at no
> charge. From what my contacts said, people moved from
> both Linux (hard to support) and pirated goods to
> legal MS products.  And of course there are some sites
> that used both open source and MS software.
>
> Steve Cisler
>
> Steve Cisler
> Center for Science Technology and Society
> Santa Clara University
> http://scu.edu/sts/
> _______________________________________________
> incom-l mailing list
> incom-l at incommunicado.info
> http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/incom-l
>


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