Colleagues, It's always a good idea to draw a deep breath before flaming. Especially when the topic is as ideologically charged as open-source.
I have nothing but admiration for Dr. Heeks' longstanding efforts to separate IT hype from economic reality in the field of development. However, his FOSS and Development brief appears flawed... The brief would be helped by short descriptions of the benefits that open-source tools provide to OECD economies and MNCs such as IBM--to enable us to compare these to usage in developing countries. In addition, I'm sure that many of us are skeptical of the idea that Apache, MySQL, and PHP aren't running on servers throughout the South -- to be credible, this inference in needs to be explicit and documented the brief. Or are we only concerned with desktop applications? In any case, I believe that Dr Heeks' analysis is based on a false assumption: that the contribution of open-source to economic development centers on replacing commercial software with free (no purchase price) and libre (modifiable source-code) tools. The impact of open-source is both more broad and less direct. As the brief itself suggests at the end, several states that have proposed adoption of open-source have been showered with no-cost software licenses by Microsoft. These licenses of course have value. Less quantifiably, the open-source movement has spurred donor-agency (SIDA), NGO (Inveneo), and volunteer (programmers at Jhai Foundation) contributions to the field of ICT4D. In addition, open-source has been and will remain integral to efforts to develop new hardware tools for village users. Development of many of these tools has relied on Linux: the Jhai PC and the (oft-maligned) Simputer, as well as thin-client networking products in schools in Goa and in South Africa (Hewlett-Packard 4-4-1 computers). Jiva Institute's Teledoc project in Haryana, India, however, has successfully used the Symbian OS and Java 2 MicroEdition to develop data communications for healthworkers using mobile phones. For these tools and subsequent hardware-development efforts, it's still "early days." The projects and products listed above barely reach the poor. Technical capacities in many African countries still limit the use of thin-client networks to run the refurbished PCs that are breaking down in schools. But these are vastly under-funded initiatives, for the most part, bucking substantial challenges of design, production, and implementation. They or their progeny will succeed in time, and open-source will have played a significant role--whether or not it is used in the tools that at last reach villagers at scale. Let's assume that per Dr. Heeks' analysis we have yet to see significant direct economic benefit to developing countries from open source. Should we then advocate exclusive use of proprietary software? Or should we perhaps adopt the position prevalent among the private sector's tech giants such as IBM and HP? That there will be some applications, some jobs, for which open-source is the appropriate answer, and others for which it is not. Regards, Ed Gaible Edmond Gaible Ph.D. Principal The Natoma Group www.natomagroup.com 610 16th Street, ste 506 Oakland CA 94612 +1.510.444.3800 ph and fax On 10/13/05, "Derek Keats" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I will invite members of this List to come visit the IDRC area at WSIS > as well as possibly the Sun Microsystems area in the 3rd Circle. We will > showcase what the AVOIR project has achieved, in development terms, > using FOSS in less than one year. I think we will have some concrete > evidence of the development benefit of FOSS that show this article up > for what it is: pseudo-science based on little or no concrete evidence. > I suspect that the author is probably familiar with Creationist > literature, that uses the same flawed type of arguments. When you read > it, it is easy to miss the insubstantiality of it because it is written > in a clever style. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
