Ubuntu Featured on Wikipedia August 7, 2006
Posted by Carthik in commentary, news, ubuntu.trackback
WorldChanging is a forward looking, optimistic weblog that I read regularly, and it was on WorldChanging that I first read about the Ubuntu wikipedia article being the featured article on August 5th, displayed prominently on the front page of Wikipedia. Congratulations to Ubuntu! Seeing a post entitled “Ubuntu” on World Changing was a nice surprise, but I guess it is obvious that Ubuntu can be World Changing.
The WorldChanging article on Ubuntu mentions a post that questions whether free software is really such a good deal for Africa (Ethiopia in particular). The point he makes is:
But this assumes that the choice for African computer users is between expensive proprietary software and free opensource software. The reality is that they have a third choice - cracked, pirated proprietary software.
He then goes on to quote ridiculously cheap prices in the the Ethiopian market for cracked and pirated software.
This so wrong, on so many levels. The “free” is not just related to the price, it has more to do with a liberating, enriching, world changing feeling. Doing the right thing, or sticking with the underdog is never easy.
…principled positions are sometimes inconvenient. Free software is no exception. It’s frequently different, sometimes incompatible and a bit more work. In some situations (dare I say it?), it’s not as good as the proprietary alternatives.
It might be inconvenient in the short term, but the long term benefits and a nation free of the guilt of using pirated software is well worth the short term inconveniences.
Isn’t pirated software more inconvenient to begin with? You have to go through the trouble of cracking it, which may or may not take some work. I suppose they have talented people working on that, so maybe it isn’t so difficult.
William, in places like Ethiopia and East Asia, it is not uncommon to find stores selling pirated easy-to-install software CDs that don’t even ask you for the product registration code. I have seen a 8-in-1 Windows XP cd in a small shop that promises to install one of 8 varieties of XP (home, professional) etc, in a snap, without needing a registration key. So yes, pirated/cracked software can be easier to install.
I don’t think that it’s simply easy in the easy-to-install method. There are other little things that a lot of *nix users take for granted while Ubuntu is by far, the easiest operating system to install, there are little useablity issues which make it less convenient for someone to work with. For example. my wireless card on my laptop is so much harder to use in linux where I have to kill services like the dhclient/dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant as I move from location to location. Under windows, with or without 3rd party software there is a fairly straighforward wireless profile manager. Take also the mp3 issue - you want to play a webcasted mp3 stream. Funny, mp3’s don’t work on my shiny new install.
All that said, I’m a huge Ubuntu fan and it’s pretty clear that it holds a good part of the key to the future of linux on the everywhere desktop. We’re close, but not there quite yet.
You may feel that the argument in the WorldChanging article is »so wrong, on so many levels« and you are, in a way, right, of course. And yet I think it remains a valid argument, one that is not really wrong. From my point of view, when you talk about the majority of (private, non-business) computer users, this is exactly what may be one Linux & Co’s biggest problems. Theses people are *not* IT professionals or even anywhere near professional, most of them are what in German usenet sometimes is called a »DAU« (Dümmster anzunehmender User, some along the lines of ›the dumbest user one can imagine‹)—and I don’t mean that in a discriminating way. But these people, at least when it comes to using privately, have been practically socialised with pirated software, they always had some ›computer nerd‹ friend or family member who provided them with every piece of software they ever wanted/needed and then some. And it never even occurred to them, that they’re committing ›a crime‹ of some sort. Most non-nerd, non-professional computer users still think, using pirated software is, some sort of minor offence, a peccadillo—if they think about it at all. I’m talking about people who *don’t* sit down in their spare time to tinker with their computers, the OS, with trying one app against another. And they’d never in the world would think that there are ›political‹ implications when choosing what computer to buy or what OS and apps to run. These people don’t care! And I don’t believe that this will change any time soon.
And what, in my humble opinion, is true for Germany, on the whole still one of the European Union’s richest countries, might be even more true for the world’s poorest countries.
Also, the big commercial software companies, especially Microsoft, may bitch and moan about their (imagined) losses through software piracy, but I do believe that this ›mechanism‹ actually help them getting where they are …
Christian, wonderful points. I think that it’s part of our responsability to be the provider of open source software alternatives. I’m currently using my wife and father as end-user guinea pigs. Ripping the Windows world out from under them. So far the lady doesn’t mind at all. But as you mentioned, she did have someone set it up for her.
Not everyone who uses open source software necessarily believes in the “free as in free speech” aspect. I use Ubuntu, but I am more of the “free as in free beer” variety. I used to use a cracked MS OS but decided that it’s too much of a hassle to maintain. But if you think that I’ll go along with the idealistic (unrealistic) vision of the FSF, then you’ve got another thing coming. And I still use proprietary (but “free beer”
stuff like Opera Browser and mp3s.
I can see why people would use pirated software, and while I do not condone such actions, I would also not condemn them. The realities of living in a third world nation may have something to do with it. The luxury of learning a totally different OS would have to take a backseat to the practicalities of life. And despite Ubuntu’s lofty goals to be user-friendly, it is still very non-intuitive to the casual user.
I think Andrew’s earlier post about troubles using Ubuntu with winmodems is more enlightening. If your choice is between free (in terms of price) software that works versus Free software that will not let you easily connect to the Internet, I think it is clear which most people would choose.
Most people I know in the first world who are technically adept do not use Linux because they disagree with its ideals, but because they have problems with hardware detection or multimedia playback or printing or another one of the various areas that Linux has trouble with. As a result, they either use Windows or Mac OS X - not because they do not want to be “liberated,” but because it is easier.
“But this assumes that the choice for African computer users is between expensive proprietary software and free opensource software. The reality is that they have a third choice - cracked, pirated proprietary software.”
Ha. More like ‘crack cocaine’; e.g. see http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html
“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software [...] Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” - Bill Gates, 1998
I hate Ubuntu.
Well, I think he is just speaking of his own opinion. We may never know how most africans actually feel about unbuntu. But if he is speaking of the general public. Then opinion is well taken.