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Maddog cautions SA against one laptop per child project
Hall told delegates at the tech conference that although the One Laptop per Child initiative - which aims to provide children with $100 laptops - meant well, it may not suit countries like South Africa. A better option could be refurbishing old computers and loading free and open source software onto them.
"Now I'm not saying it is a bad project, but I have alternative for you," he said. "If some of the banks, financial institutions, engineering organisations [etc], decided that they, when they upgrade their computer systems, were going to allow them to be taken apart, refurbished and put back together, and employ people in South Africa to do that and then sell them for $100 a piece, you might find that will generate a huge number of jobs for people and the money will stay inside of South Africa.
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Comments (4)
do both
Maddog - crazy old fox
Jon "Maddog" Hall sure knows how to cut to the chase. The clear, concise ways he illustrates the advantages of FOSS over MS is just beautiful.
That, by the way, is the essence of my contention that businesses should actually care about the "free" in free software more than the "open".
Well put.
ESR had and has a good point that "open" is less scary and easier to grasp for some CEOs, but it's all the freedom that comes with the code that makes it so valuable to a business.
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Maddog's suggestion makes sense, in conjunction with the laptop project.
I used something similar on a much, much smaller scale to get some computers to people who didn't already have one. A local business let me add a request for old computers and parts on their monthly customer bills for one month. A local bank responded with 2 SUV's full of good parts. All I had to do was match 'em up to make working systems and then match those systems to people.