[ Ubuntu-BD ] Gates offers free software in Asia

[Omi Azad]

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/09/gates-offers-free-software-asia

Gates offers free software in Asia

Pulls Intel trump card for digital have-nots

By Mark Ballard: Friday, 09 May 2008, 5:31 PM

BILL GATES HAS OFFERED free software for a million PCs the Indonesian
government is trying to acquire for students, according to the Jakarta
Post today.

Gates met Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, the
world's fourth most populous country, yesterday to talk about how the
country was also the fourth amongst 'piracy offenders' in Asia. He was
also there to renew Microsoft's 2006 deal to supply software to the
government and to add another University to its growing international
network of proprietary training centres.

The newspaper reported that Gates promised free software, "if
Indonesia could make a deal with Intel chairman Craig Barrett, who
will meet Yudhoyono in Jakarta next week".

The government was trying to buy a million PCs for under $200 each to
get more computers in education. Indonesia had one PC for every 1,000
students. It aimed to have one for every 20. So the deal might not
quite bridge the digital divide, but at least it throws a rope near
the far bank.

Microsoft's push into Indonesia and other Less Smug Countries (LSCs)
pitches US industrial might against European guerrilla software
innovation.

USAID, the US federal overseas development fund, supports a tech
innovation competition run by Microsoft in Indonesia that attracted
100 proposals last year.

The software giant has also since 2006 established a network of 110
Microsoft Innovation Centres in 60 countries, the last of which it
launched in Jakarta yesterday, which provide training and encourage
firms and students to use Microsoft software. It now has five such
centres in Indonesia.

The Europeans on the other hand have given €0.7m to the Flossinclude
programme to encourage homegrown opensource development in Asia, India
and South America.

Rishab Ghosh, an opensource guru at Maastricht University who helps
run Flossinclude, said that Microsoft was being forced to take the
"drug-pusher strategy" to Asian markets because of competition from
government-supported open source initiatives.

"They give free software to governments, but they are not going to
keep it free forever. They'll start charging, and then they make it
difficult for you to migrate because of their proprietary standards.
That's the classic lock-in strategy of the monopoly," said Ghosh, "In
the long-run, you have to pay the company that you are dependent on."

After his meeting with Gates, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, gave a heart-swelling speech about how IT could "fight
poverty", "raise the dignity of man", and ensure no less than the
"survival of the human race".

"We must promote technology that will reinforce, not lose, our common
humanity," he said.

This was once the philosophy that led One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a
scheme to get cheap laptops the into the hands of African school
children, to choose the open source Linux operating system for its
machines. Open source software was supposed to spawn a network of
do-it-yourself software engineers and local repair shops across LSCs,
instead of spods trained to fill the corporate coffers of a US
multinational. But OLPC has since said it might drop Linux for
Microsoft's Windows. Sales of Linux laptops weren't going too well,
the Wintel giants were charming LSC governments with a competing model
of cheap laptop, and people were pirating Microsoft software anyway.

Gates, renowned for his tycoon philanthropism, used his trip Indonesia
to promote his vision of Microsoft as the means by which impoverished
peoples will raise themselves up on the crutches of knowledge and
modernity.

Microsoft's pitch is also identical to OLPC's once egalitarian call to
action. Microsoft's proprietary training centres would be a
"sparkplug...empowering citizens with IT skills and nurturing strong,
local software economies".

Giving free software to LSCs would also help Microsoft solve the
piracy problem in Indonesia. It merely repackages Microsoft's old
policy to piracy in LSCs, which was to let it ride because it got
people locked into its software. Gates may as well gift sand to the
Arabs.






--
Omi
http://omi.net.bd

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