Open Source Makes Waves In Africa 17
smarquard writes "Open source has arrived in Africa in a big way. Idlelo: First African Conference on the Digital Commons, in almost-the-southern-tip-of-Africa Cape Town from 11-15 Jan 04, has attracted a strong lineup of African OSS advocates, as well as international OSS and IPR figures like Richard Stallman (FSF), Loic Dachary (FSF France), Rishab Ghosh (Infonomics), Wendy Seltzer (EFF) and Dimo Calovski (UNCTAD). Could this be the turning point for a continent that least needs to be locked into paying inflated license fees to US corporations ? The conference is co-hosted by African OSS lobby group FOSSFA and the University of the Western Cape."
Should be a great conference (Score:2, Interesting)
If you've never been to Cape Town and live in the rest of the world, it's a great place to visit and this conference will give you a fresh perspective on Open Source in the developing world...
Re:Should be a great conference (Score:2)
PS: Do you live in Cape Town?
boa-constructor is african too. (Score:3, Interesting)
But who cares where stuff is from? OSS have lifted social/political and financial boundaries, and suddently there is good software from all over the world.
The tone of this article is patronizing and irrelevant.
Re:boa-constructor is african too. (Score:2)
I am using boa-constructor right now on a demonstration project for Python. I am impressed with how it helps to speed up the development process-- I think it's the Python IDE of choice. It will help me get away from Visual Basic!
Re:where stuff comes from (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're a developing country (like South Africa, whose government spends several billion Rands every year buying software licenses, 80% from the US), perhaps you're better off spending that money in your own country, or at least your own continent.
Re:where stuff comes from (Score:2)
ZA's goverment is already commited to Open Source, as are many other institutions. It's mainly large unwieldly conglomerates like Banks who have a foot in either country who waste money by getting into bed with Microsoft.
flogging the dead horse, but anyway... (Score:4, Insightful)
At the moment I'm working to set up a Free Software organisation in my country. I, and others, have put a lot of work into it, looking around at other orgs to see how the goods ones are run, etc. One strange thing I've noticed is that in my search, I've found 14 active Free Software orgs in Europe, but not one active OpenSource group.
And now we have this article. The people that have decided to make the effort to turn up such as Stallman, and Loic Dachary are called "OSS advocates". Both are very clear that they do Free Software.
The two terms refer to the same set of licenses [compsoc.com] (pretty much), but they represent different movements. Freedom isn't a dirty word, and Richard and Loic are representatives of the Free Software movement. Both are busting their asses to give freedom to computer users. A bit of accurate recognition would be good.
Re:flogging the dead horse, but anyway... (Score:1, Informative)
Freedom of speech is great, but saying that Bush is a member of the Green Party is still a lie.
Yay! I live in cape town (Score:2, Interesting)
By the way open source has in fact been here for a while,I dont have all the links on hand but
Contrary to what you may think cape town and SA in general has a thriving PC population and even frequent LAN games [langames.co.za](100+ games in CT every month or so) despite fairly [soltek.co.za] poor [comx.co.za] hardware support (I dont even know where to buy apple macs around here (no big loss))