Poverty ... and 'piracy'

Poverty and 'piracy'... that's the vicious circle which the poorer countries of the planet are caught up. Can Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, or FLOSS) provide a way out? The United Nations is taking a closer look at a global movement which was spawned by geeks, decades ago, and for entirely different motivations.

Shahid Akhtar, the Pakistani-born Canada-educated head of the Bangkok-based UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP), made a short but pointed presentation at the launch of this event. Many developing countries, he argued, are caught up in a vicious circle of poverty and piracy. "They are too poor to buy proprietorial software, and resultantly 'piracy' goes upto 90% in some countries (of the Asia-Pacific regiion)," he argued. Then, countries cannot clean their act on 'piracy' because they are poor. "FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) provides a way out of this vicious circle. It alo increases the user's control. It also provides a framework for promoting intellectual capital, and achievming the millenium development goals (MDGs) which were accepted by many countries," he commented, reflecting the seriousness with which the United Nations network is taking a new system of knowledge generation and knowledge sharing that has been such a success in the software world. Richard Stallman, the founder of the two-decades-old Free Software Foundation (more about his presentation later), has his own take on using words like 'piracy'. "I guess there is no piracy in Cambodia because it is land-locked," he said, half-jokingly. Then, Stallman went on to draw a sharp dividing line between attacking ships on the high seas (the original meaning of the word 'piracy') and the sharing of software. Sharing software is very important, Stallman stressed.