Darwin's Theories Blog

New Theories for a New Time

Thinking globally, acting locally - on African Debt

2006-03-14
A school I do some work for is sponsoring a school in Africa, and they asked me to help them get a MS-Windows PC, but I didn't. I gently but firmly steered them to an open source *NIX, explaining both the technical and social advantages of open source and my take on African Debt. 'I can't solve the African Debt problems by myself, but I can do a tiny bit to slow it down. Every time we export an MS-Windows computer there, we are exporting at least ,000 in debt. Debt that they will have to pay to upgrade new releases of Windows over the expected lifetime of the computer. Debt to pay for Microsoft Word. Debt to pay for extra memory and disk space needed for Microsoft bloatware. In this context, Open Source means never having to say you're sorry.' And you know what? They listened. Open Source Systems and OpenOffice rule!