Bob Warren's description of the Brazilian situation almost exactly mirrors that of Bulgaria:
"Pirate" Windows everywhere: not because Bulgarians are crooks or lack morals (well, there are a few dubious characters lurking here and there; mainly in the government), but shear necessity caused by the undesirable fact that Microsoft is the king of the hill and the average Bulgarian is rather worried about how to buy a decent pair of shoes for his kid rather than worry about the licence fee for the OS or 'Office'. Sooner or later the European Union will absorb Bulgaria, and the happy software police will start poking their noses into every little 2-bit company and carting off their PCs with a Windows OS on it. Some forward thinking folk have paid me to install Ubuntu onto their PCs I charge about the same as an avrage family's weekly shopping - i.e. about 5% of the price of Licensed Windows. As I mentioned in my previous posting about my political stance: surely it is only right and fair if we expect everybody in the world to stand on their own 2 feet and not sponge off others, or poor countries sponge off richer ones (whether by choice or necessity) that they start from a level playing field. PCs running FREE (as in, you only pay the IT-bloke to install the stuff) software flattens the playing field quite effectively. Now, there will always be people, mainly in the richer countries, who prefer to use Mac or Win (or RISC OS - sorry, my hobby horse), and will pay both for their OS and for their licensed copies of RR or what-have-you. As individuals and nations elsewhere become richer they may decide to change over to Commercial software alternatives. If (for instance) all the kids in Uganda learn to program using RR on Ubuntu, then when and if they transfer to Win or Mac they will automatically seek out Win/Mac versions of RR. At present nobody is making any money out of software sales in Bulgaria - because the Bulgarians are helping themselves - so nobody will lose anyhting if they are encouraged to opt for open source; and, just possibly, that may eventually lead them to pay money for software they have invested their time in in mastering. I believe that it would, ultimately, be in RR's interest to release a FREE (as in totally free) version of RR for Linux - possibly modified from current Linux RR versions so that it cannot be used to manufacture standalones for commercial platforms. sincerely, Richmond __________________________________________________ See Mathewson's software at: http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html _______________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------- The Think Different Store http://www.thinkdifferentstore.com/ For All Your Mac Gear --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
