Activists have called for developing nations to turn to open-source software rather than Microsoft, since open source isn’t controlled by a single company and can be developed by anyone.
“Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger,” said John Barlow, an Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, who added poor nations can’t solve information technology systems of their own until they quit paying for expensive software licenses.
Barlow and others made their comments January 29 at the World Social Forum, protesting the World Economic Forum going on in Switzerland and basically opposing capitalism, the Bush Administration, and Microsoft, among other causes.
Microsoft has argued open-source can prove more expensive than Windows when you calculate the service costs, while opponents like Brazil’s government itself say open source makes sense for developing countries where 10 percent of 182 million people – Brazil’s population – have home computers and the government itself is the biggest computer buyer in the country.
Microsoft’s responses to open source have included offering discounts where they think they’re losing business to open-source alternatives and launching stripped-down versions of Windows in developing countries.
The World Social Forum had eight hundred computers running open source programs, according to reports from the conference – but they hit an embarrassing snag when two big screens showed a computer running Windows, the toolbar visible at screen bottom. The computer was disconnected swiftly and replaced with an open-source laptop, the reports said.
