Hi On Dec 5, 2007 3:59 AM, William Case <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > Does anybody have a feel for the potential growth of Linux and OOo in > the Third World?
I do. The potential is amazing and growing. Popularity is also gaining and people a really starting to see the benefits. > I have the "One Laptop Per Child" project in mind, but I am sure there > are hundreds of other projects or growth opportunities. Is OOo's > competition mainly in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand? I love the OLPC it's a great project. I first had a chance to play with it at a conference organised by the Pacific Island chapter of the Internet society in Honiara last August. A number of Pacific Island countries ha ve shown interest and some, such as us here in Vanuatu, are trying to organise test ground for potential full scale deployment. > Does the fact that OOo is free, really contribute to its expansion into > other parts of the world? Not really. The main obstacle to the expansion of FOSS in develloping nations is that most of them have no or poor copyright laws and even poorer enforcement. They just use pirated software which a lot of the times is readily available at the corner store. The expansion really happens as a result of education as people further their skills and gain knowledge of the net benefits of using FOSS. > Is this a head-to-head competition with an attempt to get people to > replace existing office suites with OOo? Or, is it mainly a competition > for market share by expansion into new markets? Depends. You have organisation such such has AUF (www.auf.org) deploying thousands of computers worldwide. In their case it is head to head completion. They've made a conscious choice to promote, deploy and encourage use of FOSS over other commercial products. They're techs are great and doing great work in that sense. The rest is mostly hole filing. People that need to write the odd document and can't be bothered installing office. > I honestly haven't picked up on this before and was wondering if there > has been serious thought put into it. Yes there sure has been. S. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
