The Ndiyo Blog

Bill Thompson, BBC reporter and long-time friend of Ndiyo, has been writing about his visit to Delhi:

I visited one company, Om Logistics, who simply cannot pay what Microsoft want to charge for licenses when one of their bureaux might make a few thousand rupees profit in a month. They use Linux on both servers and desktops, and the result is that they have an affordable and reliable system. Soon it wlll be even more suited to their needs, because Indian developers will be deciding how it should develop.

These programmers will take today’s Linux code and make it far more useful to the people of India and other developing countries than today’s predominantly Western developer community ever could. And when that happens the centre of free software development will soon begin to move from the US and Europe.

Free software provides a bridge between the affluence of the West and the poverty of most of the world’s population, and amounts to a massive flow of intellectual capital into the developing world.

On Wednesday 17th I’ll be giving a talk/interview about Ndiyo at the Future In Review conference in San Diego, with Tom Rabon from Red Hat. It should be a good discussion.

FiRe is a great event - I was there last year - and we’re grateful to Mark Anderson and the other organisers for enabling Ndiyo to attend this year.

According to AP (quoted in Technology Review)

Piracy accounts for about 35 percent of all new PC software installations globally, an IDC study estimated last year — costing the industry an average of $40 billion annually.

My guess is that most of that is accounted for by people ripping off Microsoft Windows and Office. So the estimate can be seen as an indicator of the true cost of proprietary computing.