hi, On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Paperless Homework < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Fouad, > > Alan here again. > > I tried to view your video but somehow it is taking ages to download. Maybe > the broadband we have is a bit slow. > yeah, they are large files. It is better to try to watch the video on-line, I guess, because the files are smaller. > To my view the greatest challenges in the years ahead is not to what levels > Internet will take the human race to, but rather can Internet reaches out to > the other 5 billion unconnected or excluded. I completely agree. That is the main point of our film, the Digital Tipping Point. Ironically, though, it is also the limited financial means of the remaining 5 billion people that will push Free Open Source Software. It is difficult to see how they can afford Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office at current prices. Ironically, it is these people who will be helping to restore competition to the North American market, because adoption in markets outside the US will drive improvement of the code base, thereby making it more difficult for Microsoft to continue to exert its monopoly power over the North American market. These "poor" people outside the US will therefore bring freedom to North America! Currently, North Americans largely agree that free software must be either stolen or low quality. They believe that only expensive things can have value. They mistakenly de-value both the Free Software and the people who use it, thinking that Free Software users must either be unintelligent or thieves or both. This mind set is imprisoning North Americans into dependence on one company (Microsoft) and perhaps two companies (Apple). People in North America are a huge resource for these companies, who regard North America and Europe as gold mines. The gold is in the pockets of the consumers, who are too focused on advertising to shape their technology choices. We want to change that focus. We want people to understand that you can get quality software for free as in beer and Free as in freedom. But we also want people to understand that even Free Software is not free software. People must give something. They must give either time or money to support their communities. So we are trying to encourage people to see value and purchase paid solutions, such as the small company Zareason.com, which offers high quality Free Software solutions at a reasonable price. > Technology today is only able to reach out to the 1 billion or less people > of the world and as it progresses to greater heights it would only be these > 1 billion that would benefit. The others would be left even further behind. Exactly! How can Microsoft afford to support another 1 billion people with free copies of its non-Free software? It can't. On the other hand, the Free Open Souce Software projects can work with for-profit companies to spread the code to the developing work. A network of 3 billion people using Free Open Source Software is more powerful than a network of 900 million using expensive proprietary software. > I think your offerings do have great future in such directions and emphasis > should be into this direction. > All of our video is your video. All you need is one place locally to be able to download and store the video, and then you can share it locally with sneaker networks. Our project is an open source project. We need someone to take responsibility for transcribing the video. We have 360 hours of video. We cannot transcribe and translate all of that video ourselves! We need help! Thank you for contacting me! -- Christian Einfeldt, Producer, The Digital Tipping Point _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
