Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 10th May 2004 02:54 UTC
Last Thursday OSNews had the opportunity to meet Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome, Ximian and among other things leader of the much discussed, Mono project. Miguel is a talented and versatile developer but he is also a very intelligent businessman able to understand the industry on many different levels. Talking to Miguel guarantees that you are very quickly taken away by his enthusiasm and optimism and his thoughtful strategies and vision on how OSS will take over the world.
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Euginia: Firstly, that's $300 **US**. Secondly, how much do you think such hardware would cost in your typical third world country? They'd be lucky if they could get such a system for for **600** USD.
I think you over-estimate the resources the typical citizen in these countries has at their disposal. 300 USD for a computer? Yeah, as soon as they figure-out how they're going to eat tomorrow. 600+ USD? NO WAY, forget it. IT IS A NON-STARTER.
Herein lies a key problem with desktop FOSS. In their own, insular little world, FOSS devs can afford to throw shameless sums of money in hardware at badly written code to compensate for its inefficiency. Not everyone is in the same position. Frankly, to posit the notion that poor people can somehow better afford Linux, when it takes more expensive hardware to run than Windows does, is spurious, fallacious illogic to say the least.