Linux as a magic bullet for poor countries myth

Nikolai Bezroukov

version 0.50

Note: Earlier version was published in Softpanorama bulletin Vol.10, No.2, 1997

A pretty popular urban mythology about Unix/Linux is that it can become a dominant OS in xUSSR region, Latin America (LA) or other poor countries.  This theme reappeared periodically in various forms in various Linux groups. There are numerous posts based on this mythology that I would like to call "Linux as a magic bullet for the poor countries myth."

This paper discusses some problems in adoption of Linux in developing countries that are often overlooked by Linux enthusiasts. Also I am not sure that Linux is a better solution than Windows as a desktop environment outside educational institutions, research and probably military infrastructure.

It some cases you can really save money with Linux.  But there are powerful factors that still make an early Linux adopter's life miserable in poor countries (and one such problem is luck of Internet connectivity). that means that  the simplistic idea of "eliminating" MS Windows often advocated by a radical part of open source movement can probably do  more bad than good. 

I think the optimal path is co-existence of Windows and open source OSes (actually Free BSD is more viable solution for ISPs and those (rare in this part of the globe) organizations that use or plan to use Macs and OpenBSD is optimal for any security conscious environment).

The real question is not of "elimination" but of "optimal proportion." 

The value of simplicity

I would agree that Unix kernel is a masterpiece of software engineering (and it always was in my books), but utilities (especially vendor supplied, GNU utilities are slightly better) are pretty close to "outdated junk" status and from the quality of interface point of view (but not from the point of view of functionality) they remind me of mainframe utilities each time I use them. BTW it would be interesting to know what percentage of, say, Slashdot readers  actually use Unix and how many of the latter part are able to wrote a complex logical expression for find without looking into man pages and/or some reference ? :-).

But this is a pretty superficial view. After all it's not that difficult to change utilities. More important factor is that with time Linux seized to be a simple OS. It became a large, complex OS not so different in complexity from Microsoft OSes. And Microsoft has advantage in dealing with this level of complexity. The problem with Linux is that is now more complex than FreeBSD and Open BSD and that means that Free/Open BSD is preferable in many application domains were low end Unix servers can be deployed, especially those where security is important. 

Linux might still has edge over Windows in stability but the gap is narrowing. It might nt be true is we compare Linux with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Windows 98 is definitly less stable but it is simpler.  Moreover from the education standpoint DOS was not that bad --  you can study (the source code of DR Dos is freely available) it separately from Windows. DOS still remains the simplest OS that was widely deployed.  Linux kernel, especially 2.4 and 2.6 based distributions is a pretty complex beast even for seasoned professionals. At the same time while it's more friendly toward Intel hardware than any other Unix, it still rather far from the level of friendliness of Windows (linux on laptops is still a joke), to say nothing about Mac Os X  (which uses a BSD kernel)

Availability of source code now means much less because the question arise: who will analyze this source code with the current level of complexity ? And the barrier of complexity is pretty high.

DOS was and is extremely primitive OS (strictly speaking it's not even OS but a simple program loader;  most unixoids do not even count it as such ;-). And due to that it was probably one of the best and definitely most popular simple OS that was widely used in education. And I can attest that KISS principle is the most important principle in modern education, especially now when programming goes farther and farther from its roots. 

Availability and level of user-friendliness of applications

Simplicity of OS is one thing. Availability and user-friendliness of applications is another. Here things are also mixed. Not all (Star Office is great, Lotus Notes and Netscape are medium quality "OK" applications available for Linux), but most Linux desktop level applications are weaker in comparison with best free or shareware Windows counterparts. They can be used, but with some losses of user-friendliness and sometimes even with the loss of the part of functionality. And please note that in at least for home environment in developing countries they actually compete with zero cost commercial applications that are widely available on "pirate CDs". 

Generally the level of competition in Linux applications is much lower then in Windows and that shows. There is nothing anything close to huge shareware market that exists for Windows and the best representatives of which compete with the best representatives of commercial programs and at the same time providing users with 80 or more present of the functionality of the commercial product often at 20% or the price (for example WinZip license costs ~$4 in volume; I suspect that WinRar is close).

Right now the best Linux user-space applications cannot compete with the best Windows and MAC applications, neither productivity wise (for example scripting language support is present in all MS Office applications and some third party applications; this is not the case for Unix applications: despite the fact the Unix pioneered TCL paradoxically there is no dominant application macro language in Unix) nor usability wise. Even architecturally the OLE, etc. are much better than anything that is implemented in Unix environment because there is none that is universally accepted in Unix world.  Also there is a dualism in linux desktop: some Linux distributions use Gnome, some use KDE.

The cost and availability of hardware

I still remember very obscure types of motherboards, video cards and NIC cards that we used in lab's PC of our university (actually PCs were assembled by a local screw driver type PC manufacturer that we contracted; God know were they got those components, but PCs were reasonably cheap). In this environment  Windows was (and is) a better deal than struggling with semi-debugged Linux drivers, especially during this period (1994-1996). And we couldn't wait for 2001 to equip our labs, could we ? BTW components itself were not bad and actually worked with Windows pretty well. So this extra ~50 dollars that were paid for Windows were at least partially justified by the ability to use cheaper hardware components and do not worry about compatibility and driver support. I suspect that driver-wise Windows in the foreseeable future will preserve a huge edge over Linux and other free OSes and I am interested in facts that can refute this statement.

Linux drivers development shows tremendous promise, which is a nice way of saying that for some important hardware drivers are still not available ;-)

IMHO it's kind of stupid to buy a brand name PC in xUSSR region or LA unless you are a bank (Dell PCs are a better value in bankruptcy proceedings :-). Therefore you either need very good people who are selecting components (which is almost impossible for university, taking into account bureaucracy and special interests involved) or .... Moreover in the total cost of fully loaded Windows desktop (I assume that all software has legal licenses) the price of Windows is probably close to 10% which (anything that is less than $50 generally considered to be in a "shareware price zone". For example Rar is $35, FAR is $25, etc.  So if upgrade is less then $100 it is a bargain as it will be used for 10 years).

Those consideration suggest that like in Western countries we can assume that home users are locked to Microsoft. But there is another important force in developing countries that is absent in USA: a popular regional way to provide some level of access to Internet and computer resources are computer kiosks. The number of users of computer kiosks in those countries are greater that the number of the owners of computers (may be twice may be more I do not have a reliable statistics). Even those users who have PC at home are using kiosks because Internet connectivity from home is almost non-existent thing due to poor quality of the phone system, high cost of local calls, etc. In many countries kiosks almost monopolize cheap Internet access representing something like a local AOL. As I mentioned before many people that cannot afford their own computer (this is true for most students) can use kiosks to do some data processing.

The kiosk owners are regulated rather strictly and usually pay for licenses for each and every machine they got ( if not, they risk to have their business closed by the authorities), so theoretically they get more tempted to shift to Linux. But the problem is that almost no user have Linux experience, and the kiosk owners fear that if they implement this UNIX clone, they will lose business to competitors. So instead of being a force behind Linux, kiosk owners de facto are a powerful force that propagate Microsoft OSes (and software) in this region.  But some opportunity still exists due to power of modern Pc which can host Microsoft virtual machine on WMware and run instances of two Oses. Choice is always better that absense of choice.

Another factor is that most developing countries have lower power CPUs (almost no Intel CPUs, most are AMD or other cheaper clones).  This can be actually good for linux as linux is AM friendly OS. There is also almost no MACs. Even on servers low end CPUs are quite prominent. RISC architectures (SUN, HP) are limited to large and rich organizations or were obtained via donations. That means that even in organizations percentage wise domination of Windows in this region is higher than in, say, USA or Germany where there are considerable percentage of servers with RISK CPUs (Sun, HP and IBM).

The cost and availability of software

In the countries discussed typically piracy is the only way that provides the regular computer user a set of software that can run on his hardware. And for most user to spend $100 - 300 dollars on software is out of question. But for organizations this is less of a problem and piracy became less and less attractive because of the pressure of the heavy pressure from the government (which is in turn pressed both by Microsoft and US government).

But actually problem of the users in those countries is that they usually overuse commercial software in Windows environment and sometimes good or better substitutes that exist for Windows are almost unknown. And the fact is that the amount of high quality information and free programs for Windows is several orders of magnitude larger than for all flavors of Unix together. That provides opportunities to teach better, faster and with less frustration which is important both for students and teachers. Free compilers for Windows (Turbo Pascal, Borland C and C++, Watcom C and C++, and now even from Microsoft etc.) are so much better than gcc for teaching and IMHO few teachers would prefer gcc as a tool for an introductory programming course. If this is not true I am very interesting to hear about some alternatives that I overlooked.

Mac is now an viable and interesting option in education, but hardware is too expensive and that essentially makes all discussion about Os X purely theoretical.

Note: Actually even command line environment now become more and more VGA environment not a pure text mode. PC became so powerful that GUI can became a single environment and VGA can be used instead of text mode for command line environment. IMHO due to it's historic roots Unix artificially connects command mode and text environment but that's probably is not the good idea anymore...  Think about VGA is a new "better" command line environment. Your mileage may vary.

Windows desktop does not mean
automatic choice of MS Office
 and/or other expensive commercial applications

Contrary to the opinion on many Microsoft critics using Windows does not mean that you need to use other Microsoft applications. There is a definite and potentially beneficial for xUSSR and LA countries possibility of the "unixification of windows".

I think that overuse of Microsoft software the major mistake in xUSSR region, LA and other poor countries Windows definitly make sense as a desktop OS, but to continue in this avenue and buy expensive (often ridiculously expensive) Microsoft Office is bad strategy. MS Works (contain Word 2000 or Word 2002) can be an adequate substitute. Older versions of Office can be adequate substitutes. software. That's why so many people refuse to pay this price :-). And organizations should refuse to pay it too. Open Office is not that bad.

And I am convinced that Star Office for Windows is now adequate for probably 80%-90% of corporate users even in a large corporate environment.  And having a pirated version of Microsoft Office on your corporate desktop is a kind of unnecessary self-humiliation. The same is true for many other commercial programs. You can almost always find some alternative that does 80% of the job and costs 20% of the brand name cost.

Best Unix software (scripting languages) are now available for PC and often runs pretty good for an average user who do not know all API calls by heart. Not only Perl, TCL, Python are available for Windows,  any  vi pervert can use his beloved editor in Windows environment too and in some aspects it is better implemented in this environment especially in GUI version (VIM 6.0 for Windows).

Free Microsoft SFU 3.5 provides pretty decent Unix environment in which almost any open source software can run.

Even a really good program that I consider a masterpiece of software application engineering -- FrontPage 2003 probably is not that good for education. Full version is a way too complex and versatile. I think you can save some money using Visual Web Developer 2005 which is free of charge:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/

(actually this is probably the best free HTML editor for Windows I know). And nobody ever force you use FrontPage extensions if you do not want them. For example I don't. Even with my Softpanorama site( which a pretty big site with several thousand of pages), I would never buy FrontPage 2002 for myself, if I were in Kiev. I would definitely use Visual Web Developer 2005  instead.

The same is true for TCL, Perl, GNU utilities and other things that I value most in Unix environment. Paradoxically due to Microsoft financing of Perl development via ActiveState as a language environment Windows is nicer for Perl than Unix (GUI debugger, nice IDE, etc.).

Also Microsoft improves scripting and you can use JavaScript as a Windows shell languages (it is an excellent scripting language that is freely available for Windows due to Microsoft's generosity, very few people and organization use it). Also now they have free Monad scripting language which you can download and install. But an important question is: "How many people push those too\ls to the extreme in Unix environment to be really able to see the difference over that capabilities of ksh in SFU 3.5?" In looks like developers is a dying category here (and everywhere), and any sysadmin should be stupid and lazy as hell by definition :-). Of course some former developers still do not think about themselves as a kind of high-tech police force that intimidates poor users, but sure they are ;-).

Unix administrators classification;
The danger of "Administrative Fascism" in Unix environment

Linux is very good home environment for students and I highly recommend it (or even better Windows-Linux tandem). But in educational institutions the attempts to introduce Linux sometimes degenerate into creation of a very limited, user hostile environment due to excessive administrative zeal.  I would like to remind you the classical definition of four types of UNIX administrators that were first suggested in a Know your Unix System Administrator by Stephan Zielinski -- a canonical computer-related Unix humor story (see http://www.softpanorama.org/Bulletin/Humor/index.shtml#Classic): 

There are four major species of Unix sysad:

1. The Technical Thug.
   Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL.
   
 
2. The Administrative Fascist.
   Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.
   
 
3. The Maniac.
   Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba are willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes.
   
 
4. The Idiot.
   Usually a cretin, morphodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers.

I think that primitive unixoids do not understand and will never understand the whole social dynamic of an educational environment in xUSSR. Well, they need to know that history repeats itself. What first was tragedy became farce. So this new software Bolsheviks (or Islamic fundamentalists if you wish ;-) just want to enforce on users what is better (or in their perverted opinion "right" for the users), and enforce it against all odds :-).

Therefore in the university environment there is always a danger that Unix became a hostile anti-user environment "one step left or one step right and the guards shoot without a warning". For some reason "Administrative fascists"  is a self-reproducible specie of Unix sysadmins and is a dangerous mainframe-style phenomenon (that's why so many people really hated mainframes in the past and so enthusiastically embraced PCs) that corrupts advantages of  the large organizational Unix environment, especially in universities.

In Windows this is usually not the case and I think this is good for a student to be a sysadmin even if he destroys a desktop a couple of times during a semester. Using Norton Ghost one can restore it in  several minutes and that's much better solution that to tie somebody's hands with sudo as many fascists sysadmin enjoy so much :-). Actually separate partition with Linux can be use as a substitute of Norton Ghost and I thing that with the current size of a hard drive it make sense to have a dual boot system with Linux that can be used as maintenance desktop for Windows. This is a very interesting avenue to broaden the Linux appeal in educational institutions.

Another important consideration against using Unix and the only game in town is that Unix is a very nice environment for teaching programmers, because, again, the kernel is the thing of beauty (especially without SMP ;-). But that's it and that are more specialties in a University than computer programming (moreover even for them OpenBSD is preferable). In the past I used to teach future economists and I would think twice before teaching them using KDE or Gnome. Not that this is impossible, but this is a risky undertaking as few of them will switch to Linux/Unix as a result and that means that you force them to go extra mile without a return on the investment. The only positive thing is that 10 to 20 percent probably will never be able to tell the difference :-).

Therefore StarOffice yes, JavaScript yes, Unix utilities definitely yes, but it seems that desktop Unix is a difficult choice to make and at least now "conditional no" or dual boot variant are better than single hearted adoption. I was responsible for such decisions in the past and I know how bad is to make  a wrong decision based on your own revolutionary enthusiasm and ignoring the actual environment in which students need to study and the environment in which will live after graduation. I made a couple of such mistakes in the past (for example at one point I prohibited all Basic introductory courses and enforced Turbo Pascal for all the specialties) and I know the consequences of such blunders all too well.

The Value of DOS or is Microsoft a new Satan ?

Dear God,
Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each
other so much if they had their own
rooms. It works with my brother.
Larry

Dear God,
We read Thomas Edison made light.
But in Sunday school, we learned that you did it.
So I bet he stole your idea.
Sincerely,
Donna

(from collection of children's letters to God by US Postoffice)

The task of education is develop general abilities and not skills of "operating" just one product.  From this point of view I am against pure Linux environment and I am against Microsoft abstinence. I still fondly remember Microsoft DOS is a tiny and interesting OS. It is better first OS than Linux. It is amazing how much one can do in 1M of memory and with CPU running at 4Mhz with this operating system... and this site is done with Microsoft FrontPage. It's really good HTML Editor, may be the best for all purposes, but definite the best for me. Version 3 aka 2002 (XP) is really excellent. Like in all products Microsoft it really get more polish and features with each version. And it's very stable. 

I understand that to gain advantages in the software and Internet markets  Microsoft sometimes used a monopolist tactic (remember DrDos error message in Windows 3.1 code and Caldera's almost 150 million dollar settlement), but almost any other commercial software company would probably behave in a similar way. Sun is far from being a saint ;-). IBM was the most hated word among programmers in early 70th.  Lotus crushed Borland with look and feel lawsuit. I can add other examples.

But DOS has tremendous positive impact of the computer world (including Unix; actually Linux borrowed a lot form DOS) and I do not want of demonize Microsoft or reject it just on religious grounds. Microsoft is part of computer landscape (both past and present) independently whether we want this or not. I am against "black and white" simplifications like in writing of some overzealous or ignorant open source advocates (ESR with his "The Borg of Redmond" catch-phrase.

At the same time you may like Windows or hate it, but in many parts of the globe the real question is economic -- can you afford it ?   Just as soon as there's a full suite of high-quality, standards-conformant, open source desktop (gnome has more corporate support now and Gnome 1.4 is available on Solaris along with Linux) as well as good application suits for Linux (Open Office is a very good such suit), people are going to start considering whether it's worth shelling out $500 for the latest windows or Microsoft Office upgrade, and yet another file format. Bottom line, folks: I'd rather keep my $500. Wouldn't you? 

Also if there is a choice between pirated Microsoft software and legitimate open source software that I definitely support the latter... The main problem in developing countries is that you need to have a license that costs your month salary (Windows costs at least $80 per PC that you are using, unless you got is preinstalled). Often it's closer to $100 in developing countries because Microsoft charges additional money for localization.  In such cases I strongly recommend use Linux if you PC has components that support it 9often this is not the case).

DrDos is also excellent first OS but only for study (in this area it is probably better first OS  that Linux). Moreover DOS is perfect operating system for virtual machine (see VMware for Linux) and IMHO the concept of virtual machine is one of the greatest concepts in operating systems design. From that point I value IBM's VM/CMS as one of the greatest operating systems in existence. At the same time, Unix is an excellent operating system -- operating system that one need to know much like English language, but the world of operating systems is larger than Unix. Much larger...

My strong opinion is that we should not restrict ourselves to one vendor software and one OS. Pluralism has its value in software engineering too. Like knowing at least one foreign language, to know two operating systems is much better than to know only one. It provides a framework to compare two different cultures. For example with all due respect to the Unix culture it is not the only culture. Dos also created strong command line culture and windows created a very interesting GUI traditions. For example even in 2001 many DOS editors are superior to the culture of  Unix command line editors simply because keyboard is uniform and rich low level interface is readily available. Same observation is applicable to command line file managers (see my OFM paper for details). If you use Linus you can greatly benefit from using Midnight Commander or other Orthodox file manager 9similar to the Norton Commander). A really good system programmer needs to know at least two different operating systems and DOS/Windows  is a good first operating system just because it is simpler than Unix.  I would like to note that Linux now has decent DOS emulation and most important educational software from DOS (for example Turbo Pascal 6) can be used in Linux environment. 

My Windows advice is simple: if you got it -- use it -- there is a lot of free and open source software for Windows. Common Unix programming tools can be successfully used in Windows/DOS environment without studying intricacies of Win32. If you do not have Windows, use free Linux disctibution like Ubuntu or OpenSuse. 

For the reasons explained above I use myself  "unixified" Windows as a client OS connected to Linux server  and I see certain advantages because it's a more flexible environment than just Unix and much more powerful than plain-vanilla Windows. Probably such a tandem is the best home environment for power users who can afford two PCs.

Other problem with Microsoft abstinence is that a lot of old Dos and current Win32 products are currently cheaper than similar commercial products for Linux and commercial Unixes and free products for specialized areas often are hard to find. I would prefer free and open alternative, but first of all it needs to be available... There is still a tremendous developer support of Microsoft OSes with a lot of high quality free or low cost software available (languages: Java, Ada, Perl, C, C++;  all GNU utilities; many editors, etc.). Paradoxically, but Windows is quite suitable platform for using open source software, especially GNU software. In this sense the phrase "GNU not Unix" have a very special meaning indeed   ;-). Recently Microsoft itself became a vendor of freeware (Outlook98, Internet Explorer, MS Word, Excel, Outlook viewers, Frontpage light. etc.) and even started to produce software for Linux -- Microsoft NetShow for Linux. This facts plus the number of software packages available makes Windows more attractive deal as a desktop even if you need to pay for the license. But the dose is important, if Windows9x came with PC ok, let's use it; if not -- you can be happy without it anyway.  IMHO it is wise to resist temptation to buy and install any additional Microsoft software... I hope that eventually Linux will become much more useful as a desktop and probably using tandem Windows-Linux will be less attractive, but still the value of working in DOS environment dictates that we need to study and use this OS.  I see that Linux is becoming a new BIOS that one can use to build applications. And I see this as a very interesting and positive development. 

Microsoft Office -- do we need it?

The selling point for the Windows are applications and here MS Office 95, 97, 2000 and now Office XP are king of the hill -- it's a very decent although definitely expensive package. Except for FrontPage, you can probably get almost the same level of functionality from Open Office. Moreover from the point of view of supporting open formats like HTML and XML Ms Office is probably not the best -- it's too rooted in the MS past. IMHO Microsoft Office is too expensive for developing countries for use on a large scale basis. Open Office adequate in power is free and is  more portable.

Again I would like to stress that MS Office became too expensive to compete with other vendors and its capabilities are not that impressive in comparison with other offerings. MS Office 97 standard edition is $458/$229 (full price/upgrade), vs Corel WP Suite 8 professional edition - $335/$137 and Lotus SmartSuite Millenium - $385/$147).  Please note that this are the prices for the Microsoft's standard version (without Access and FrontPage) against Corel's and Lotus' top-of-the-line. See the recent letter by Leonardo Lopes  in Linux Gazette for views similar to mine. Realistically there is no substantial advantage of using Microsoft Office in developing countries... And $999 Microsoft Office 2000 Developer Edition (includes the FrontPage Web design tool and PhotoDraw graphics editor, not included in Office 2000 Professional), is a difficult choice even for companies in Western Europe...

Windows as a server -- just say "no"

The second strategic mistake (and the rather large money drain that I see) is to use NT as a server. This is a costly mistake because Windows server on low end is more expensive that Unix alternatives (Free/OpenBSD and Linux) in many important areas; even those areas where it is better (file and print services) Unix solution with Samba is good enough.

This trend to use Microsoft server offerings in the xUSSR region is very alarming and counterproductive and probably is somewhat connected with such negative factors as corruption, laziness, luck of specialists due to brain-drain, luck of literature, steeper initial learning curve, etc.

Government, hospitals, universities, etc, can definitely save money using exclusively open source OS-based servers  with no negative (and some positive) consequences. But actual financial losses are not very clear: the number of local networks in organizations is very limited (for example almost no hospital have a local network).

As for server I am much more skeptical about Microsoft offerings. For the server as somebody put it "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -- that's essentially close to what Windows does. 

Microsoft moved graphics into kernel because theoretically it's a good thing -- you have one uniform interface and set of tools -- not a two-layer system as in Unix and Os/2. IMHO this is a questionable architectural decision -- there are several important negative side effects: 

• Windows less friendly to remote system administration using command line tool; 
• Although JavaScript and VBScript are available as a shell language, shell scripting in not that impressive on Windows to say politely. 

From technical standpoint Windows 2000 and XP carries over an old Windows problem: it is too suspetable to viruses and worms.

Many IS managers believe that Windows is easier to use than it actually is, scales better than it does, and is powerful enough to do what UNIX can do just because they got used to Windows  interface. Although there are some real benefits to Windows serder -- an easy user interface, the familiarity of the Microsoft brand and the last, but probably most important -- the availability of commercial applications -- I would like to stress that Windows is far from replacing Unix as a server. On high end it is simply unacceptable, on low end and midrange the prices of Microsoft commercial offering are often deceptive and TCO is higher.  Commercial Unixes (for example Solaris 10) scale much better and would produce a lower incremental administrative overhead than Windows. Solaris is better for running Oracle and other major commercial databases.  Linux and FreeBSD servers are more that adequate for low end servers. 

A substantial part of the cost of the ownership of any Microsoft product is hidden in the prices of upgrades, add-ons, client licenses, documentation (Microsoft Developer Network subscription), etc. IMHO over reliance on Microsoft Windows might leads to the deterioration of the quality of IS staff and one needs always compare Microsoft offerings with the price of Intel-based Unix solution before making a final decision. Microsoft�s software has a greater complexity then Unix software

Conclusions

Usage of Linux and other free OSes in developing countries has some constrains  that are often ignored by open source enthusiasts.

One of such constrains is that the computering environment in developing countries is different: computing kiosks and cafe represent an important part of infrastructure that is almost completely absent in USA.  for example Web access is for most citizens is possible only via such cafe and kiosks. Internet access from home computer most often is limited to e-mail (UUCP) and shell accounts. 

Usage of Windows as an OS on desktop is actually less harmful with proper 'unixification" of the environment. One of the often overlooked factor that limits usage of Linux is the diversity of hardware. For some components drivers that can be found probably are often only Windows drivers.

The author think that the area were usage of Microsoft OSes is especially problematic is its usage in the server environment, not desktop environment.

At the same time there are some possibilities of increasing Linux awareness in this region via Linux based computer cafe and kiosks and if such kiosks can provide Internet access for lower price that Windows-based counterparts than this area might became the most promising area where the effort of open source enthusiasts can give a real return. 

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Julio Le�n (Peru) for the comments on the version 0.3 of this paper.

References

Please consult http://www.softpanorama.org/Social/oss_in_developing_countries.shtml 

Comments are very much appreciated.

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Created: May 16, 1996; Last modified: March 12, 2019