First Monday: Licence Fees and GDP Per Capita: The Case for Open Source in Developing Countries

“There is a strong case for free software (also known as open
source or libre software) being deployed widely in developing
countries. As argued in this note, the open source development
community provides an environment of intensive interactive skills
development at little explicit cost, which is particularly useful
for local development of skills, especially in economically
disadvantaged regions.

“Further, this note argues that the controversy over total costs
of ownership (TCO) of free vs. proprietary software is not
applicable to developing countries and other regions with low
labour costs, where the TCO advantage lies with open source, and
the share of licence fees in TCO is much higher than in high labour
cost countries. The note concludes with a table comparing license
fees for proprietary software against GDP per capita for 176
countries…”

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