[WSIS CS-Plenary] Licence fees and GDP per capita: The case for open source in developing countries

[Robert Guerra]

<http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/index.html>

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

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.