Boing Boing: Politics of Free/Open Source Software adoption

Monday, June 6, 2005

Politics of Free/Open Source Software adoption

Kenneth sez, "The very cool Social Science Research Council has just completed a robust report on the politics of free and open source software -- the first substantial look at the issue, from an international perspective.

"In the spirit of the theme, the report is free online and placed on a Wiki so it can be edited/updated by the community (who can even earn a bit of bread by tweaking it!)."

* F/OSS is likely to be explicitly integrated into party politics where the state plays a prominent role in technology-centered development. In such contexts, F/OSS offers a powerful and distinctive technology agenda that aligns most frequently with left-leaning critiques of globalization. Brazil is the most prominent example of this alignment—as well as of the party-identified internal opposition that it generates.
* F/OSS adoption requires a substantial private sector for software support and other technical services. Richer, better-organized migrations (e.g., LiMux) can contract multinational F/OSS providers such as IBM and Suse to manage the transition, and also undertake efforts to promote the growth of local support services. Poorer candidates, such as Kenya or the civil society sector described by Coleman, face a chicken-and-egg problem in which the service sector is often unable to provide the technical and human resources to support large-scale F/OSS adoption.

Link (Thanks, Kenn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:13:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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