"way back in the 1990's" (was: Re: [ubuntu-women] introduction

[Clytie Siddall]

On 07/03/2006, at 9:11 PM, Claudine Chionh wrote:

> I was in India in January and met Vidya there. I heard about the  
> trouble
> she had getting Ubuntu CDs delivered. So there can be all these
> non-technical barriers to getting access to Linux.

Most definitely. That's the difficult thing: there are layers of  
barriers. :(
>
> I went to study at a community health project in a small town in
> Maharashtra. Their big message is empowerment and appropriate
> technology, so health workers are using local herbal medicines and
> artificial limbs are made out of cheap but sturdy materials. But their
> computers run Windows. If I'd been there longer maybe I could have
> instigated an open source revolution. ;-)

Hope so!

The trouble is, the people in power locally tend to have sound  
financial reasons for propagating Windoze.

It doesn't just happen in third-world countries. Where I was working  
some years ago here in Australia, teaching people who didn't speak  
English and people with learning difficulties, we had a roomful of  
Macs, and our students loved them, did extremely well with them, even  
with absolutely no instruction. One day, we were told we were only  
allowed to use Windoze. We were part of a state-wide organization,  
using thousands of computers, many of them Macs, and all non-Windoze  
computers had to go. No arguments on what was good for the students  
had any weight at all. We later found out that M$ had made a dirty  
deal with our financial decision-makers: use _only_ Windoze for X  
years, and we'll give you machines and Windoze software more cheaply.  
Despite the fact that our mission statement was supposed to be the  
good of the students, the dollar talked a lot louder. :(

It talks very loud in a poor country. M$ is extremely good at these  
dirty deals. You may find your local community college or  
impoverished third-world community centre is locked into one of these  
deals, and has absolutely no choice of OS for the next X years.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN