Promoting Open Source in Schools

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hi Peter,

>>http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-503108.html
>>    
>>
>
>That's an interesting article, Evan. Do you have any sense of whether
>there has been progress on that front in the intervening years?
>  
>
I do know that the Jamaican government has started to learn about the 
merits of open source and more schools have started to use it. Now that 
this is happening, though, there's another threat. Microsoft is giving 
huge handouts to developing countries, sometimes in cash or computers 
but often in "forgiven" illegal licenses, in order to maintain the 
dependency and increase obstacles to change.

At a UN conference I attended earlier this year in Geneva, the biggest 
detractors of FOSS amazingly came from some of the poorest countries, 
whose representatives might as well have been reading a prepared script 
singing the praises of proprietary vendors. The most vocal, I recall, 
was Zimbabwe. (That conference was also memorable to me, because at the 
speakers' dinner organizers accidentally sat Stallman next to the lawyer 
from Microsoft and me right across from them ;-) ).

Thankfully, the politics isn't stopping the action at the grassroots 
level, but as is so often the case there's little support from above. 
The large Microsoft grants to the United Nations Development Program 
hasn't prevented many regional office of the UNDP from still being very 
pro-open-source, however their doing so right now goes against the 
"party line". And thankfully there are many NGOs out there who 
understand the drug-pusher-style tactics of cutting prices (or handing 
out free samples) in order to build or maintain dependency. But it's 
still an uphill climb.

Notably, the above tactics have been used without any success at all in 
China, where one company estimated that almost one in three desktops now 
run Linux and the gap continues to close.

Just my opinions, of course.

- Evan

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml