The Blog From Hell

By nature of what I do, I get to read litterally hundreds of ((research projects)) funded by various bodies about the viability of ((FOSS)) usage in ((Africa)) and the potential problems with it.I have assume that similiar research is going on constantly in other developing nations – doing it has certainly become a cashcow here. So why are they all exactly alike ? The obvious answer – that they all discovered the same basic facts just doesn't hold water, because they all ignore the same facts as well and they all seem to make the same basic fatal flaws.The first fatal flaw is to judge economic effect in a very short term space. Any economist can tell you that the economic effect of anything takes an average of at least five years to become truly visible. When you're talking about something like FOSS in Africa – where it's usage has only really started recently, not only is the timeframe way to small for measuring economic impact – the sample space is far too small to measure anything.Each failed project seems grossly out of context in such a small sample space. But the figures are, if anything, much better than they were in the early years of the FSF ! If you do a comparative study like that – African FOSS projects have a remarkably high rate of success, and such impacts as can be measured is very hopefull. The projects to roll out in schools for example have the potential for a massive economic impact – but what that impact will actually be cannot be empirically determined before the first of those children leave school. There is absolutely no doubt that in a country where very soon the majority of computer literate school-leavers will be specifically literate on FOSS systems – this impact is going to be measurable. But even there the eventual results won't be visible in the first year.At first in fact, expect growing pains since most companies there are not using FOSS yet – their next potential workforce will be skilled in, and hopefully advocating for, something they are not yet familiar with. In a few cases, the companies will switch. In many, they won't and some of those first school-leavers will be sucked back into a proprietory world.In five years though – when just about every potential employee only knows FOSS – it will not be viable for companies to insist on, or retrain, them all – and most likely, almost all will be forced to switch (never underestimate the power of the workforce).What will be the economic benifit of such ? Who knows. Potentially, the country can become a major contributor to the international software market, an export income it sorely lacks at this stage. At the very least it will have the capacity to become self-sustainable in it's software needs, something very few countries (in fact, just one) can claim. Of course the proprietory vendors always downplay this – and in fact they tell us that we need to increase patent laws and copyright penalties, and add things like DRM into law to grow our IT economies. There is absolutely no evidence to support their claims in this regard of course – and even if they were true, they can only be halftruths. Doing so will help foreign software providers make bigger profits – and maybe a few local companies will develop international quality software in a vacuum and export it. At best we may see one or two local big corps benifiting. There is no way these laws help SME's though – and that is where growth lies. Wealth comes from entrepeneurship. The developing world needs a lot more entrepeneurs -and laws should be made in such a way as to make it easier for people to start new enterprizes, and make them successfull, such laws can have a positive economic impact. And the realities are, as a software developer in a small FOSS company – I can state unequivocally that our costs are at least exponentially smaller than they would have been in the proprietory world. Not paying for licenses saves us initial expense. Using hardware for longer saves us running cost. But more than any of that- being able to build on the works of others, saves us massive R D costs. We could have created the OpenLab (http://openlab.getopenlab.com/) OS, OpenBook, (http://openbook.getopenlab.com/) eduKar (http://edukar.getopenlab.com/) and such entirely alone – but there is no way we could have done that with our small staff in just four years ! We could do that because in each of these products there is a massive amalgamation of code by people all over the world – we just built on top. That is a saving incalculably huge. People want proof that FOSS developers can create better products in a shorter space of time ? Companies like analogous paper on the subject shows this better than I could. So when will see research on that ? How best to serve the human rights issues highlighted by the FOSS community ? For once, the developing world has the opportunity to lead rather than follow – to be champions of a forgotten human right. Will we grasp this opportunity ? Shouldn't the research papers be working out the best ways we can ?