Ubuntu & Africa

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 2/3/07, Pay Wahun <paywahun at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I just came from visiting West African states of Sierra Leone, Liberia,
> Gambia and Ghana & Nigeria. I came across few friends whom I advised to take
> a look at Ubuntu but after displaying Ubuntu and analyzing reasons why they
> should consider it, they in turn advice me to considering windows. Their
> reasons are; they are heavily into Windows and that Windows doesn't cost
> them anything. They conclude that Ubuntu and Open Source would cost them
> time to learn why Windows wouldn't.  Also, any windows product can be found
> in the market for less than $6.0. Yes! I saw vendors selling Vista, and
> current versions of  Adobe flash 8, Dream weaver, Acrobat writer, Photoshop,
> XP office, dream weaver, Quick books, Goldmine, Peachtree Accounting,
> AutoCad - you name it - any three software for less than $6 without any
> activation problem. According to them open source can not succeed there and
> they would change the way Microsoft do business by providing them their
> products for free as they are now providing them Internet Explorer. I'm
> scheduled to visit that region again in April 2007 and was wondering how,
> why and what could I do to convince them to consider open source in place
> face of their pirate products. Any ideas could be helpful.
>

There are some reports that half of the pirated Vista contains adware,
malware, trojan horse, etc:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/25/HNpiratedvista_1.html

So yes they get Vista for $6.  But do they know what's under of the
hood of these pirated copies? Are they willing to take that risk, and
on top of that pay $6 for that chance, just because it is "easier" to
learn

But arguably, someone could also be giving out for free copies of
Ubuntu with backdoors in them. But I like to think we live in a
perfect world where that wouldn't occur...




-- 
Daniel Robitaille