Dear GKD Members, My comments refuting this paper are interspersed within the text. I do not believe that it is appropriate to allow such pseudoscience to go unchallenged.
regards derek --------------------------------------------- On Thu, 10-13-2005, Dr Richard Heeks wrote: > Free and Open Source Software: A Blind Alley for Developing Countries? > There is considerable interest in the "e-development" community about > FOSS: free and open source software. It is argued to be cheaper and > more customisable than proprietary software; it is argued to be a > potential kick-starter for the local IT industry; it merits a mention in > the WSIS Plan of Action. So what is its likely trajectory? Here is the stated objective of this paper, to determine the trajectory of FOSS, by which the author presumably means the direction and speed rather than its path through space, although this is a sufficiently obscure analogy that it is already subject to interpretation. I will interpret it to mean will FOSS grow and will it grow rapidly, or will it stagnate or shrink...something like that. > We can turn first to historical evidence because we have been here > before. In the 1980s, "shareware" - FOSS' forerunner - was a temporary > source of excitement for exactly the same reasons; even attracting the > attention of the World Bank. Yet the developmental equation for > shareware was "Impact = Zero". This is the first example of classical pseudoscience. The approach goes as follows. Find something that is totally unrelated, but that sounds similar, and use what ever happened with it to argue that the same thing will happen with the thing we are discussing. This type of fallacious argument is used often in so-called creation science. It is a vacuous and meaningless argument although it often sounds clever and convincing. Shareware has nothing to do with FOSS, it is proprietary software, which is actually the opposite of FOSS. Logically, the failure of shareware to dominate the world is a failure of a particular model of distribution of proprietary software. Do I need to explain more fully why arguing that proprietary software represents FOSS is fallacious? I hope not!! > What of the evidence today? A recent survey on our eGovernment for > Development Information Exchange plus survey data from Africai suggest > at most 5% of computer systems in developing countries have any open > source software running on them, and that is almost entirely represented > by Linux. Even in Cuba, where the US embargo should make conditions > highly propitious, proprietary software dominates. This is another logically fallacious means of argument. Selecting a particular indicator of current state of a system to argue that the state will not be different is again pseudo science, but a clever style of argument whose logical fallacy is not always obvious. When the automobile was just coming out, the state was that the penetration of automobiles was low, yet look at automobiles today. Accepting this argument is accepting that we cannot change things. However, it does do one thing for sure, and that is it alerts us that we need to create the push and pull that does lead to change. > Because of piracy and the limited size of initial purchase price within > total cost of software ownership, there is no clear, general evidence of > FOSS delivering cost savings. Because, by and large, FOSS means Linux, > the benefits of customisation and IT industry kick-start are also > nebulous. This is another pseudoscientific argument, although I am struggling to categorize it in relation to known logical fallacies. However, the argument goes like this: since most people break the law, there is no obvious benefit of obeying the law. OK. Another erroneous proposition: FOSS means Linux! Once you assert this, then you can ignore everything else, and just concentrate on Linux (GNU/Linux please). This is another common pseudoscience argument technique: make a false assertion that people will probably believe, and then lead the reader into ever more false conclusions by derivign other assertions from the false one. > The lack of strong evidence of FOSS benefits helps explain its lack of > success vis-a-vis proprietary products. How did we get here? What is the lack of strong evidence? No evidence of absence has been presented yet in this paper. This is again another pseudoscience argument technique. Make an assertion that may sound believable if you accept the previous fallacious arguments, and derive the argument further on that basis. Folks, learn to see this type of arument for what it is, a deliberate attempt to put forward a point of view that is unsupported by the evidence. When evidence exists, one doesn't have to use these well known tricks. There is another pseudoscience trick here as well, the attempt to use absence of evidence as if it were evidenve of absence. It is known that despite the obvious fallacy of this trick, most people don't pick it up! Hence, despite the fact that it is well known, clever pseudoscience users often use it. They believe that they will get away with it. > In particular, proprietary software may not be open source but it is > certainly free for the great majority of developing country users, > thanks to piracy. Thanks to piracy!!!! While I do not support the term piracy, I do belive that statements of this nature are just plain foolish. > Other key factors uncovered include: Lack of awareness of FOSS: the > African evidence suggests most IT managers simply don't know about it. No evidence of this lack of knowledge is presented. An opinion is presented as though it is an incontrovertable fact. Indeed, it is my experience that most IT managers do know about FOSS, it is their client community of users who need education. So I would like to see the evidence of this lack of knowledge in the managers. It may well be true. > Poor international links: to work effectively with open source code you > need to be part of an active, global community of like-minded > developers; links to such communities from developing countries are > weak. This is true of developers, networking is vital. But there are lots of other ways in which FOSS gets deployed in the developing world besides development. I would argue that those developers who are involved in FOSS are very well linked internationally, and that there is a large diaspora community out there as well, but that is experience based and may be a subjective interpretation on my part. It ignores the fact that the IT private sector has begun to market FOSS, especially the expansion of companies like IBM, Oracle, HP, Novell and Sun Microsystems into FOSS, and the arrival on the scene of initiatives like Ubuntu, and the recent acquisition of majority shares in Impi linux by Canonical. As the founder of the AVOIR project, we have a rapidly growing network of African Free Software developers that is very well connected internationally, and we can show measurable impact in proportion to our scale of operation. > Donors have moved in with interventions to support FOSS, as recently > seen in Tanzania with the development of Jambo Office. Yet such efforts > are found to make little impact. To date, they have been amateurish; > focusing on the techies who write the code, and failing to introduce a > business focus that would draw in needed market research, marketing, > distribution and support skills. Please provide some evidence of this. I have only experienced very dedicated professionals who are on the path mentioned, but not yet there. It is usually not possible to finish a journey in the same step used to start it unless it is a very short journey, but oops...maybe I am resorting to personal experience to refute this claim. I may be wrong, but then, no evidence for this claim has been provided either. > As so often, too, donor FOSS projects have been short-terms flares of > interest rather than the required sustained efforts. They are no match > for proprietary firms who are in for the long-haul, and who will use the > carrot of low pricing and the stick of anti-piracy actions to achieve > their aims. Another logically fallacious argumenty...few donor-funded projects are intended to compete with proprietary firms. The argument sounds so good that its vacuousness is easily overlooked. > Even the potential "backfire" of anti-piracy actions, leading > organisations to abandon their pirated proprietary products and adopt > FOSS instead, seems exaggerated. Microsoft and the Indonesian police > recently launched a crackdown on cybercafes. As could be predicted, many > owners changed over to FOSS. However, users then stopped coming to those > cybercafes because of their unfamiliarity with the software. Soon after, > the pirated products were back in place. Here is a very good example of a pseudoscience argument that is also well known. Link something that is nuanced, without providing the nuances, and use it to draw the desired conclusion, or create the desired idea in the mind of the reader. The implied conclusion may in fact be true, but it cannot be drawn from the evidence presented. Other conclusions could also be drawn, with equal vacuousness. The devil is in the detail! > FOSS' trajectory, then, is intimately bound up to proprietary software, > especially Microsoft products. This is a tautology, it is not at all revealing. It could be no other way, unless everyone were to run a dual boot system, separate all the FOSS onto one system and all the proprietary software onto the other, and run each an equal number of times. Given that this is a low probability, this is tautological. > At best, FOSS looks like a lever to extract concessions from Microsoft > and similar vendors. In its present state, FOSS will remain a marginal > activity that does not deliver on its development promise and that is no > match for the enduring power and business acumen of major proprietary > players. This is an interesting choice of words, it sounds great, but logically, lets unpack it...in its present state (i.e. ignoring the poor sentence construction and assuming he means 'if nothing changes')...it goes like this...If the state of the system remains unchanged, then the state of the system will be unchanged. Ja, well, no, yes, a definite probable maybe. I do believe that people who claim to be presenting research have a responsibility to do so without resulting to pseudoscience and vacuous arguments calculated to sound like logic. It wastes a lot of time otherwise. Derek Keats, October 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] > The enthusiasm of those working with FOSS is encouraging, though that > engagement doesn't per se make them any more able to make an informed > judgement than those researching FOSS; indeed, it may make them less > able to stand back and see the big picture. > > FOSS has been an area plagued for too many years by talk of what it > could do or might achieve. Then, some real evidence - three surveys and > two cases drawn from three continents. This presents a very different > picture: one of marginality and with no sign, unless factors change, > that we are going to see the developmental potential of FOSS really > delivered. > > You can read this message in two ways: either that FOSS will never > deliver; or that the FOSS community needs to rethink its strategies. Or, > of course, if you've devoted months or years to FOSS and don't like the > message, you'll try to denigrate the writer, deny the data, and so > forth. > > As much as anyone, I'm working to see ICTs deliver for development. My > worry is that the FOSS community is not reality-checking itself. Too > much talking to other believers; not enough standing back to see what is > really being achieved. > Richard Heeks > Development Informatics Group > University of Manchester, UK ------------ ***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/>
