[luau] News - Namibia wisely spurns M$ 'gift' in favor of Linux

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Fri Nov 1 22:11:00 PST 2002


This writer's last sentence says it well.  "No wonder Gates has more
money than God. ®"  (Note: Bill Gates sold over 3 million shares of
Microsoft at $50 during the last few days.)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27878.html

The African nation of Namibia is large in area and small in population
with considerable distances between communities. Imagine the challenges
of getting its schools wired to the Net. SchoolNet Namibia, a chiefly
volunteer organization, struggles to do precisely that with a free ISP
and numerous other initiatives to get the nation's schools, many of
which lack any library resources at all, on-line.

Imagine the pleasure with which SchoolNet would initially have
confronted a charitable overture from Microsoft involving free software.
Now imagine the disappointment of learning that accepting the 'gift'
would entail outlays of money in the range of fifteen times the value of
the M$ Trojan horse.

The idea was to obtain fifty inexpensive laptop computers from Acer and
for Redmond to donate some of its Great Software. It appears that
SchoolNet had at least briefly labored under the illusion that the
operating system software would be donated as well, but this was not to
be. The company was willing to donate only free licensing for Office
Pro, valued at $2,000," while SchoolNet would have to lay out an extra
$9,000 for OS licensing in order to exploit the privilege of using the
office software.
(continued in article)




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