Microsoft or Mandrake? News from Nigeria

My colleague Ben Melançon has already cross-posted this twice: you can find his full post on his own Agaric blog or on the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab.

Microsoft made tech news in the past week with reports that schools in Nigeria would use Windows XP rather than the Mandriva Linux on 17,000 computers ordered from Mandriva, a French GNU-Linux vendor. Public statements from Mandriva officials suggested foul play, but not many details were reported. Now, the Nigerian government has overruled the switch, Jeremy Kirk of IDG News Service reported, and his article published online yesterday by Computerworld UK has a lot more information on what actually happened.

[...] Ben goes on to say [...]

Everything a student learns about Windows and every program that is built for Windows are in a sense owned and controlled by Microsoft, because Microsoft decides what happens to Windows next (and what happens will usually involve your wallet).Everything a student learns about GNU-Linux, especially every program she makes or contributes to is both truly belongs to her and belongs to the whole world at the same time.This distinction is not limited to Windows versus GNU-Linux; it holds true for every proprietary versus free software choice.Nigeria has started on a path of building knowledge and technical resources that can't be held hostage. We probably have not seen the end of what Microsoft will do to try to jump Nigeria's claim on the future.

I find that people I talk to who aren't already sold on software purism have a hard time with this line of reasoning, but I think Melançon is absolutely right. This is why our software choices matter, not because open source software is cheaper to use right now, but because the long term impact of the communities we build is a broad and lasting impact.