Licence fees and GDP per capita: The case for open source in developing countries

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

Licence fees and GDP per capita: The case for open source in 
developing countries by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh


Abstract:

There is a strong case for free software (also known as open source 
or libre software) being deployed widely in developing countries. As 
argued in this note, the open source development community provides 
an environment of intensive interactive skills development at little 
explicit cost, which is particularly useful for local development of 
skills, especially in economically disadvantaged regions. Further, 
this note argues that the controversy over total costs of ownership 
(TCO) of free vs. proprietary software is not applicable to 
developing countries and other regions with low labour costs, where 
the TCO advantage lies with open source, and the share of licence 
fees in TCO is much higher than in high labour cost countries. The 
note concludes with a table comparing license fees for proprietary 
software against GDP per capita for 176 countries.

read complete article at 
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/index.html