One picture saves a thousand words, so I’m almost done.
Uruguay is a small country, only 3 million people. That explains the fluctuations on the graph but the trend and substance is clear. According to Statcounter Uruguayans are using GNU/Linux regularly and in great numbers. That almost certainly means government, business and consumers have ready access.
Let’s record some famous battles in this war:
- 2002 – The San Jose region voted to use Free Software
- 2003 – Uruguay’s parliament passed a resolution requiring exclusive use of FLOSS in government.
- 2008 – OLPC went to 395K elementary children as the best value chosen by government.
- 2010 – The government extended OLPC to high school students, 90K of them…
The high numbers from Statcounter are supported by Wikipedia which shows 10.68% of hits are for GNU/Linux. I think these data support the idea that government and education are keys to promoting FLOSS and GNU/Linux. Government by the people for the people should use FLOSS by default because it’s the right way to do IT with software provided at lowest cost openly and not by exclusive dealing amongst suppliers. Those guys will always maximize their profits instead of giving the consumers a good deal because that’s the philosophy of the leadership of Wintel at M$. The consumers clearly need low-cost PCs but Wintel is busy driving up the cost to keep the price of M$’s licences hidden.
