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Promoting Free Software in Developing Countries
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| That's a reasonable price, but still $190 too
| much for most people in developing countries.
| The best solution remains sending out CDs and
| DVDs that can be copied and handed out locally
| among people who want them.
|
| It would be easy to create a Web site where
| people from around the world applied for free
| CDs/DVDs, and where those in the countries
| with more resources could burn those discs and
| send them out. But there are a few problems
| here. First, there are issues of privacy:
| people might not want to send their addresses
| to a site such as this. Then there is always
| the danger that the discs sent out might not
| be ârealâ distros, but might include malware.
| That can be addressed using MD5 hashes from
| the distros concerned (for example
| UbuntuHashes), but that's a slow process,
| especially on older machines.
|
| [...]
|
| As well as the purely philanthropic aspect,
| there are good selfish reasons why people
| might want to help spread free software in
| developing countries. It would increase the
| market share of core software like Firefox,
| OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux, which would help
| persuade more companies to support them, and
| more governments to adopt them. It would
| increase the pool of programmers who can
| contribute to free software projects, making
| them better for everyone. It would also make
| it more likely that entirely new, indigenous
| applications would be created for developing
| countries and their particular needs. It
| might even lead to a whole new era of free
| software creation and use.
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http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Promoting-Free-Software-in-Developing-Countries-970345.html
Related:
Free/Open Source Software recommended for use in developing countries
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| Allen Gunn of the USA based NGO Aspiration says "FOSS is both a
| democratizing and empowering technology, giving practitioners
| control of their technological destiny while creating
| publishing, infrastructure and revenue opportunites that
| would likely be unaffordable with proprietary software".
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http://www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=2793
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