I get hammered a lot for having standardized, very low cost hourly rates - people laugh, but as this paper points out, open source services must above all be affordable to the developing economies. That's the motivation behind an hourly rate that is a fraction of what is normally charged in the U.S. Hope others get the same thing out of this article.
When the Windows XP license costs for a country equate to more than 1 month of GDP work (in some case a few *years*) something is extremely wrong. I expect Open Source to be adapted in those countries and promoted in those countries universities much more successfully than, say proprietary software.
Richard Schilling
On 2004.02.18 14:35 Tim Churches wrote:
This report, commissioned by the Swedish govt development agency (and referenced by the IOSN site) is useful:
http://www.sida.se/Sida/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1250&a=23955
Nothing startling, but a nice review of the background and an examination of open source business models in poor countries, plus some case studies in Sri Lanka. Nice. One day soon it will be possible to produce a health-specific version of such a report. --
Tim C
PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
