Open Source in Developing Countries - I

The "Free Software Movement" that Richard Stallman started in 1983 was brought a big leap forward by "Linus Torvalds" in 1991 with the invention of Linux kernal. Other open source evangelists like Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens have major contributions to the open source movement. Have a look at the history of free and open source software in wikipedia. (There are philosophical differences between Free Software and Open Source Software, discussion of which is not the intention of this writing.)

Open source has emerged as viable alternative to the expensive proprietary software. From operating system to user application, from eye candy multimedia applications to serious research projects, from embedded system to large server, from desktop to web application there exist suitable software applications to serve the purposes. In the contemporary world, corporations are constantly fighting for lowering operating costs. Many have already opted for Open Source software stack.

Software is a tangible staff. It is easy to copy and run in other machines. Most developing countries don't have any strict laws to protect the intellectual property (IP). Even if there exist some laws, they are very rarely enforced. Many societies also don't consider it bad to pirate (aka steal) software and don't discourage this practice.

But the world is changing. Many developing countries are immensely contributing  to the advancement of the IT industry. The software development was once mostly centered in the US. But the landscape is rapidly changing. India and China have emerged as software development power houses. Other developing countries including Bangladesh are also continuously progressing in this area. These countries produce world class software engineers who are frequently creating sophisticated software applications. Companies are spending money to build software and they will definitely want return from their investment. If their products are pirated, they can't be happy. Therefore, pressure is mounting to derive laws for protecting the intellectual properties of their own software in many countries.

Globalization has also huge impact on pursuing laws to protect IP. Under the hood of Globalization, the dispersed national economies worldwide are integrated into a interdependent global economy. The multinational corporations are very much concerned over how their IPs are protected in those countries where no IP protection laws exist. These companies often have immense power on the political system of many developing countries. They together with their respective home countries will influence or pressurize to derive new laws for IP protection.

So the days are not very far when most countries on the Earth will have more or less homogeneous IP protection laws. The citizen would be obliged to pay for using each commercial software. This will obviously be a huge burden for the society which is accustomed to pirate software. The moral setup will be more difficult. If someone is comfortable with software piracy, how to resist himself from it.

It is now necessary to realize that there are potential alternatives to usual proprietary software. There are replaceable open source software for almost every commercial applications. In the next post, I will explain how to change the mind set and get accustomed to open source software.