[ Thanks to Lars
Erlandsen for this link. ]
“The Nooitgedacht Primary School, on the outskirts of Cape Town,
is little more than a few drab buildings surrounded by barbed wire.
The school can’t afford a library, and only a few students have the
money to buy uniforms. But up two flights of stairs in room No. 6,
a class of fifth graders sits hunched over 20 computer terminals,
writing with word-processor programs, experimenting with
spreadsheets and familiarizing themselves with the mouse and
keyboard. How does a level-C school–the lowest on the South
African government’s poverty scale–afford an up-to-date computer
lab?“Linus Torvalds has never been to Nooitgedacht, but he’s the
most likely answer. Torvalds, a Finnish computer scientist, was
only 21 back in 1991 when he invented the Linux operating system
with the idea of competing with Microsoft’s Windows. Rather than
sell copies of the software for a fee, Torvalds released Linux’s
source code–the original program–into the public domain. That
kick-started the so-called open-source-software movement, which has
since produced a whole suite of programs, from word processors to
spreadsheets to video programs—most of it free. In recent
years some big companies like IBM, HP and Oracle, but also foreign
governments like those of France and Germany, have embraced Linux
as a way to stem Microsoft’s dominance in PCs…”