Hi,

The 'free' in Free Sofware is more like the 'free' in Free Speech than than the 'free' in Free Beer. Free Software as encouraged by the OpenSource community mainly focuses not on paying less or more or nothing, but on getting the source code.

May the source be with you and with fellow Ethiopians back home :-)

Sendek Alama

You have no idea what you just did. May the attention of the giants be somewhere else.

A friend got a few games from an Addis software shop. His virus detector found one or two viruses, but missed several. Result, the 1-year-old gaming pc ground to a halt, and has never been the same since. He won't try that route again.

An individual might make the calculation you describe and choose the pirate software. Businesses will have a more difficult time even if they go the pirate route today. Most likely (sooner rather than later) they will end up having to buy software or updates to keep their business running. Some people have asserted that Microsoft doesn't care about piracy in developing countries since it helps to establish their installed base and they know that eventually they will get paid once the customer is locked into their software file formats, etc.
As others have pointed out, the "free" in FOSS refers not so much to the cost but to the freedom of having access to the source code so the software can be fixed or updated to meet your needs and also the freedom in knowing that your valuable information (much more valuable than the software itself) is not locked up in some proprietary format.

So ... unrelated thought. I keep on hearing stories filed by your wife on Public Radio. Always an interesting perspective ... her work is appreciated. Her story yesterday on Diaspora Ethiopians returning to Ethiopia (what a thought! - read sarcasm here) was refreshing.

Is there a free lunch? One experienced hacker said one problem with some crack software on sale in Addis is that it is bought cheap in Thailand and places and not screened before sale. The originators may have added spyware to look for financial information etc on your harddrive or keyloggers to check how you log on to sites requiring financial information. They want some reward for providing the cheap software, and selling wholesale what will eventually be copied and retail for Birr40 is not it. His advice - if you buy at some Addis software shops, don't use the Internet with that PC again. Hmm.. its spoiled the taste for me.

If I'm a computer user in Addis, and I want to use graphics software like GIMP or Photoshop, I don't especially need the source code, even if I knew how to use it in the first place.

I just like to point out that the free software foundation and open source software foundation work with different values. Thus opensource software is not necessarily free software. Opensource - making source code available for practical reasons while free software is making software free for ethical reasons. Opensource is about collaborating in development, while free software is just what its name says. So, Ubuntu is a opensource and thus the choice is - one either pays for a expensive proprietary software or gets his hands dirty and join a community of hard working and dedicated IT professionals. Getting Ubuntu to work may be difficult compared to Windows and the reason is because unlike MS Windows, it is extremely scalable and requires a lot of it knowledge. A lot of people assume it is because Windows is better. Windows might be better if you only use computers for word processing and spreadsheet applications but if you want to use your computing power to the maximum Linux leaves windows far behind.
As an African I would say nothing gives the African youth better (long term) opportunities than to join in the opensource revolution. By learning to read source code and contributing to it Africans can join in the technological revolution. Proprietary software vendors want to sell products while open source allows everyone to contribute ideas and intellectual wealth and benefit from it. By default proprietary intellectual property protection excludes the multitudes of people from taking part in technology. Alone for this reason African governments should make open source available in Schools and Universities. It is cheaper and inclusive.
The learning curve may be steeper but the long-term benefits not to be under estimated. Think of India and China.
By the way more and more non-IT companies are beginning to adapt the concepts of opensource in their research and development and are cutting costs across the board and delivering new products at a much faster rate.

Interesting, I wonder what your opinion is of plagarism. Presumably the same as some other South Africa journalists.

Well, it is an increasingly pertinent problem that there are individuals and even small organizations where software piracy is rampany. This does not apply to the likes of Adobe and MS alone, several high end CAD packages, 3D renderers like Maya, Programming tools like Visual Studio, and also games and movies are all being sold by people claiming to give first world software to the third world at a small price, by bypassing the legal barriers.

I am increasingly in favour of FOSS not because of the fact that it is free alone but because of the great improvements in quality standards of these software over the years. Enterprises which are turning to Linux and which are paying professionals trained in linux (or consultants) are encouraging this FOSS movement and sooner or later, the software content of the world could be jointly owned by all who use it. Thats an idealism of course, and there will always be problems like DRM and IPR Management. There is no one route, so an uneasy combination of proprietary and FOSS will have to do the job now.