First Monday: Development, Ethical Trading and Free Software | Linux Today

First Monday: Development, Ethical Trading and Free Software

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Jan 4, 2000

[ Thanks to Nik
Shafiruddin
for this link. ]

“This paper makes the political and ethical case for the
adoption of free software by Community Aid Abroad and other members
of Oxfam International. It should be applicable to development
agencies generally, and to other organisations with similar
values….”

Software is often prohibitively expensive. The standard
price for an ordinary office package might be a year’s income for
most of the world’s people.
As one Mexican project adopting
free software wrote:”

“The primary reason for reaching this decision was the kind of
money we would have had to pay if we went for proprietary software:
at US$55 for each machine with Win98 and Office, US$500 for every
NT license and an average of six workstations and one server for
140,000 labs, that’s a lot of money.”

Complete
Story

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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