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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Uprising!

Seems the oppressed masses are casting off their yokes of oppression. First China, now the UK government and health service - where next?

Why will we see more of this? Well, First Monday has a paper this month concerning Licence fees and GDP per capita [via Boing Boing] which shows that while it takes around a week to earn the money to buy a copy of Windows XP in the west, in China it takes more than 7 months (the paper has a comprehensive table). The only way to respond to this has to be to bring the costs of computing in-house, and that's what China has done.

I am sure we'll see more and more of this - Vietnam (16 months to buy a copy of XP) has already taken the decision to switch to open source, forced there paradoxically by a US trade delegate that made them sign up to enforce intellectual property treaties, and there must be many more dominos like this lined up in Asia. It's not a matter of anti-anyone religion; it's a straight matter of being forced there by the facts, just look at the figures.

posted at 5:47 PM (UK) | |