Forums : FOSS Questions

Dear Open Hub Users,

We’re excited to announce that we will be moving the Open Hub Forum to https://community.synopsys.com/s/black-duck-open-hub. Beginning immediately, users can head over, register, get technical help and discuss issue pertinent to the Open Hub. Registered users can also subscribe to Open Hub announcements here.


On May 1, 2020, we will be freezing https://www.openhub.net/forums and users will not be able to create new discussions. If you have any questions and concerns, please email us at [email protected]

Spreading Open Source in Kenya

Hi Sebbybey,

I agree, and this is what we have seen with Ingres. www.ingres.com. It is used by universities here in Spain.

Cheers,
Dean

D33 over 15 years ago
 

It's extremely difficult to spread free software. Here in Croatia, Microsoft has strong ties with politics, and the attitude of politicians is approximately: Microsoft is very kind in giving us free software.

How can you effectively fight such attitude coming from the highest levels? They are the ones who, in the end, have far more access to greater amount of unwashed masses. They are the ones who decide to enforce programs such as ECDL among teachers. Those programs base themselves around Microsoft's software.

My sister in chemistry school is being taught how to work with Microsoft Access, and is taught about Microsoft SQL, IBM Informix and Oracle being used in professional environments. That may be true, but where are Postgres and MySQL?

It's easy to say you need to start from the root, but how to get to the root? How to change teachers who are nowhere near being IT professionals? If they are IT professionals, how to change their rooted perspectives? How to change politicians? How to change professors at universities if they believe that Microsoft is the Source, the Alpha and the Omega?

We really need practical directives and we really need a World Domination Plan(tm). Without one, we can speak all we want, but we can't affect anyone.

By the way, it's more important to spread free software than open source :)

Ivan Vučica over 15 years ago
 

I think this way is not the one and only :) There is wonderful celebration annual worldwide celebration of free/open-source software (http://softwarefreedomday.org/). There were two events in Kenya in 2008 as I know: http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/africa/kenya/sfd_msa, http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/ke-chix. It's amazing! It goes without saying that SFD popularises Open source.

Here in Russia, we had 4 SFD teams in 2007. We prepeared a couple of articles in open source magazines.
That was followed by increasing the number of teams in Russia to over than dozen. Many of them host in universities and attract the students' attention.

Information distribution about Google Summer of Code 2009 (http://socghop.appspot.com/) is another wonderful opportunity to popularise Open source anyplace.

lek about 15 years ago