On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: > gee thanks for that bit of knowledge... > was thinking of one on SME segment and FLOSS - viable ? > thoughts anyone
I think this would be a great talk! It is useful to watch what type of FUD that Microsoft is spreading to know what types of questions you'll get. Here is one that I believe is worth talking about: http://www.bday.co.za/bday/content/direct/1,3523,1266306-6099-0,00.html Microsoft's South African manager Gordon Frazer: "And while government's idea of training open-source developers is admirable, it will not create new jobs but will simply replace thousands of existing jobs for people who now work with proprietary software, he argues. " This article refutes a small part of the FUD above (IE: that there is a difference between jobs in foreign multinationals and local jobs), but you need to go further. It has always been of interest to me to see Indian companies selling to Indian customers, rather than Indian labour exported via multinationals with the resulting products/services resold to Indian customers at foreign (primarily US) rates. It is important to expand this to show that not only is it not a one-for-one switch from foreign to domestic labour rates, but that an Open Source software services economy is simply going to be larger than a Software Manufacturing software products economy. With small business entrepreneurs, and the low cost to market entry, there will be uses put to computers and software that simply wouldn't exist with centralized Software Manufacturing. I am thinking of those Internet terminals put into rural villages, and how tele-health and livestock marketing happened online in ways that were simply not thought of by the project planners. I can barely imagine what would become possible if all the software shipped with these Internet terminals came as FLOSS (legally shareable, shipped with the source and fee compilers, etc....) (Thinking of a talk I attended given by Ashok Jhunjhunwala from http://www.tenet.res.in/ last summer) For most of any economy, Software Manufacturing shows up in the 'expenses' column. With software services, and the Free Market created by Free Software, these expenses will be minimized. You only pay for the software services that you need, and can do a much better costs-benefit analysis than with the artificial dependencies on monopoly manufactured software products. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen and not a third party. -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/ -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
