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The Open Option
Seema Javed Amin from the Open Source Resource Center (OSRC) project of the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) writes about how Pakistan is combating piracy by using FOSS alternatives.
A cash-strapped computer student or a professional cannot afford to purchase different software packages of Microsoft’s MS Windows XP Home Edition, which costs about Rs5,000 or more per package. But illegal and pirated computer versions are available in the local market at a fraction of the original cost.
Countries such as Australia, Brazil, China, India, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Japan, Malaysia, Peru, South Africa, South Korea, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, the United Kingdom; California, Oregon and Texas in the United States and Zambia have saved a lot of money because their government projects and businesses have switched from proprietary to open source software (http://www.iosn.net/downloads/foss_primer_current.pdf).
This fact might not be very well-known in general, but its proponents have been working quietly behind the scenes, revolutionizing computer technologies since the sixties and seventies, providing computer users, who cannot afford expensive proprietary software with an alternative set of options.
Source: Dawn
FOSS Training / workshop under ASEAN Cooperation at C-DAC, Chennai, India
