How Linux Helped 5 Poverty-Stricken Governments

Published on October 14, 2008 in General by Rami Taibah

This is a contribution post discussing 2008 Blog Action Day theme, “Poverty“.

Imagine you are the minister of education of an impoverished country, with a limited budget to improve your schooling system. You realize the importance of computers in education, and also realize that failing to provide a proper IT infrastructure to your country’s youth would have a grave effect on your country for generations. You are not aware of such thing called “Open Source” what would happen? You would probably end up spending thousands on software to equip your school’s computers, and with the budget constraint, you will roll out only a fraction of the computers actually needed. This would put you in front of two options; either some schools get computers, or cramp 10 children in front of one computer.

Spain

Luckily the local government of Extremadura, Spain are more technically adept than you are. Extremadura has a big problem: its population density is very low, with 1 million people spread over 40,000 km2, most living in provincial villages scattered around the region. In reality, Extremadura has only three “big” towns, Mérida, Badajoz and Cáceres. This demographic structure had severe consequences on development of the telecommunications and IT sectors. Private companies don’t see Extremadura as a lucrative market, it would require a big initial investment since the region is huge (larger than Belgium), providing little or no profitability due to the low population.

Also, Extremadura is one of the poorest regions in the EU, and the cost of proprietary software needed to run the network was just too much to bear. So the government decided to use free software; in the beginning due to its low cost, but soon they realized that free software is a powerful tool to provide “technological independence” and avoid reliance on global conglomerates and monopolies.

For more information about this remarkable success story, check out my interview with Daniel Campos, a lead developer in the project.

Russia

Russia plans to migrate ALL migrate all their schools to Linux! According Alexey Smirnov, Director General of the Company ALTLinux, most schools run pirated software, but with Russia joining the WTO laws have become stricter, and the cost of buying all that software? Well thats off the table! Here watch this news clip from Russia Today aired last March

India

The most literate state in India, Kerala, has migrated 12,500 schools to Linux. The education minister of the state MA Baby was quoted saying “Free software guru Richard Stallman’s visit last week had nudged the schools to discard the proprietary software altogether, Stallman has inspired Kerala’s transition to free software on the lines of an exciting model of a Spanish province, which did the same.” Here check out the kids and Linux and FOSS in action!

Brazil

Brazil loves Linux! We all know that, here are some beaming examples:

  • Ministry of Cities fully operates on Linux, with Microsoft no where in sight.

  • The government launched a PC program called “PC Conectado“, the PC’s are low cost and has Fenix Linux pre-loaded. Although admittedly, a big percentage of these PC’s are turned into Windows through pirated versions.
  • The KDE desktop has been deployed for 52 million students!

Philippines

The Philippines government found that Linux is more viable than a heavily subsidized Microsoft package! Advance Solutions Inc. (ASI) has won a bid to supply each school with 10 desktop and one server in 1000 schools. Ricardo Gonzales, an Open Source consultant recruited by ASI says:

We wanted to use Fedora 5 and it went all the way to office of [the Filipino] President and they kept passing it around saying ‘why would they offer something for free, and how would they support and teach it. The project dragged on for four to five months to a point where Microsoft matched the price by offering Windows XP for $US20 a copy and throwing in Office for $US30, but we still came out cheaper. Microsoft was also providing free training to high school teachers

The government loved it so much that it ordered 3000 more units, supplying 300 more schools, and bringing up the tally to 13,000 units. Also, 10,000 additional Ubuntu loaded units will be installed in 2008! Here is the complete coverage of computerworld.

About Rami Taibah

Rami Taibah the founder of The Linuxologist and a self proclaimed geek and Linux aficionado. This fall, he will be pursuing an MIMS degree at UC Berkeley, California. You can follow him on Twitter @rtaibah.

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  • Graham Bae
    Hey Rami,

    Good to see you blogging hard for Linux users. Consider me a subscriber, I really enjoy reading your articles; keep it up mate!

    Graham.
  • Macedonia where I'm from, bought 20.000 Edubuntu PC's with 160.000 thin clients for them for a project named "Computer for every child in Macedonia" and distributed them accros all primary and secondary schools across Macedonia.

    http://www.ncomputing.com/republic-of-macedonia.aspx
  • M4rc0
    I'm proud to be brazilian =D

    Go linux!
  • Hi,
    I live in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. It shares a border with Kerala. But more of a M$ shop 'cause we have a lot of big time IT outfits here which pay the M$ tax.
    Great job of telling the world where GNU/Linux is making a major difference. But did you notice in the news item mentioning the Kerala IT project there was no mention even once of the 'GNU/Linux' or 'Free Software' or 'Open Source'! Though if you looked for it carefully you can catch a glimpse of the 'Gimp' in one of the frames. I am sure the TV channel NDTV did not want to rub M$ the wrong way!!
  • Sid Boyce
    Published numbers and percentages applied to Linux are irrelevant. One can and often has on copy of Linux bought or downloaded which goes on numerous machines. No one can say how many copies of Linux I have installed here on 7 PC's together with all the virtual machines I have running with many other distros.
    Great article describing what must just be the big apples in the barrel. Most articles totally ignore the widespread use of Linux, mainly concentrating on the support licenses taken out with RedHat and Novell - lies, damn lies and statistics come to mind.
  • How Linux Helped 5 Poverty-Stricken Governments http://tinyurl.com/5274vk #bad08
  • Ya I got that comment yesterday. "when I watch these news reports about linux on your blog you realize how these news readers don't understand what they're talking about. and you realize its not just linux they don't understand, everything they report on is probably equally poorly reported :D" was one comment :P
  • In the first video, they call it freeware, not your fault, but it annoys me just the same.
  • Ragflan, percentages can be tricky, while there is no official way to compute the number of Linux users around the world, I can assure you it’s more than 1%. Just recently the world has hit the 1 billion PC’s mark, meaning that 1% would be 10 million users only, anybody would tell you thats not a very accurate number.

    In any case a small number like 15,000 or even 100,000 isn’t really gonna tip the percentage scale. You need 10 million users to gain one percentage point! :)
  • Ragflan
    I have a question. I'm using Ubuntu Hardy myself and I was wondering that with so many school making the switch, we're talking millions of people switching to Linux.

    I mean, 15000+ school in ONE state of India alone made the switch. That alone should tip the percentages even by a little. So, how come the market share for Linux still is at 1% only? Should it increase by a big amount?
  • o ya, i'm use the same plugin with your (WP THREAD COMMENT). but, there's no running well in my blog. Please give me some advice..
  • NIce article, shown us the different in another country...
  • Thanks Binny, interesting blogpost. The fact that you are from Kerala, gives it even more credibility.
  • Thanks Pavs, it means so much coming from you :)
  • I am from Kerala India - and FOSS is taking off in a big way here. There are many LUG groups and most of them are very active.
  • Great article Rami! Enjoyed reading it. :)
  • RT bianconeri4ever: Check out my @blogactionday post about "Poverty". How Linux Helped 5 Poverty-Stricken Countries. http://is.gd/42jO
  • Check out my @blogactionday post about "Poverty". How Linux Helped 5 Poverty-Stricken Countries. http://is.gd/42jO Plz comment/Digg/Stumble
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