While Malaysia and India have recently made deals with the Devil, Thailand had some good news for Free Software, distribution of one million tablets running Android/Linux are being cranked out by a factory in China over the coming months. The advantages of making such a large purchase direct from the factory are that economies of scale and the possibility of fixing problems that might arise make this very cost-effective.
“The $32.8 million One Tablet PC Per Child campaign (1.02 billion Thai Baht) is the world’s largest education tablet distribution deal to date, and finally became official after members of the Pheu Thai party announced the initiative last summer during election season. In partnership with the Chinese firm, Shenzhen Scope, 400,000 tablet units are expected to ship within the next 90 days with an additional 530,000 units on the way. The latter part of the deal is currently not finalized, but the country’s government hopes to continue working toward one million tablets for its students. If Thailand successfully pens the deal for the second shipment, the venture budget will come to a whopping $75.7 million sum for the entire program.”
Apple was found to refuse to sell to people who speak Farsi, the language of Iran. They claim it’s to prevent export to Iran even though the person lives in Virginia, USA, and is a US citizen.
This is another example of what’s wrong with Apple. Instead of sticking to business producing great products at great prices, Apple considers itself entitled to abuse customers and competitors.
I recommend Apple’s customers go to Debian GNU/Linux. Debian has a good social policy. “Our priorities are our users and free software
We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments. We will not object to non-free works that are intended to be used on Debian systems, or attempt to charge a fee to people who create or use such works. We will allow others to create distributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without any fee from us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system.”
The BBC carries an opinion-piece recommending FLOSS for business. While the piece recommends FLOSS generally, the specific example given is Drupal, a web-content management tool. The same advantages apply to all the infrastructure of IT, not just servers and networks. FLOSS is the right way to do IT and should be used on client machines as well as servers. Far too many organizations neglect web applications and support huge overheads running particular applications on PCs when they could get better performance and lower costs running GNU/Linux and FLOSS apps on the server and GNU/Linux on the thin client.
“open source delivers innovative solutions to business problems, faster and cheaper.”
I recommend Debian GNU/Linux because it has a huge repository designed to work on client or server and easily maintained whether you have one or thousands of clients.
My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.
My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.
I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.
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