Hi all, I feel that in the future the Asian countries would be one of the major users of BSDs. I realy see a major growth in the number of BSD users in these countries.
The major reason is that BSDs are FREE. Secondly because of incidents like http://news.com.com/Indian+president+calls+for+open+source+in+defense/2100-7344_3-5259836.html http://news.com.com/India+leader+advocates+open+source/2100-1016_3-1011255.html?tag=nl Thirdly most of them have not even heard of BSDs but now there is a small wave of awareness rising. Last time I went to a computer book shop I saw the "FreeBSD complete Reference" and now one tech magazine distributed FreeBSD 5.3 also with their free CDs last month. But a major trouble is that many many of the BSD books are not yet available in the Eastern Economy Edition. This makes it difficult for the people to purchase them because a book might cost their 1 month salary when shipping is also included. So there must be some awareness among publishers to follow the path of provoding Eastern Economy Editions for all BSD books. So something must be done in this area. I'll give some example of the Price differences. Lets take Dru's book http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bsdhks/ This Edition costs $24.95 US which is equivalent to 1,093.23 INR ( Indian Rupee) but the same book in an Eastern Economy Edition will only cost around 320 (INR) http://www.cb-india.com/book.asp?bid=BK00006683&pageref=&key=&catid=&authID= Last week I saw the FreeBSD Complete Reference in the Local book store( It was not available before). This Edition cost only 650 (INR) but the same book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0072224096/104-8303620-5073523 costs $32.99 ( exclusive of shipping, shipping might cost another $40 as they charged me that much for Jacek's "Building firewalls with OpenBSD" the book's cost was also $40) $32.99 = 1,445.75 INR ( Indian Rupee) So one of the major and easy steps that can be taken to provide study materials to the Asian countries is by making the publishers aware and requesting them for Eastern economy Edition for BSD books. I don't know exactly how to go about this but I feel "Dru" and "Jacek" may be able to do something about this since they have written books and are in contact with some publishers. Thankyou so much kind regards Siju _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
