Gates offers free software in Asia

BILL GATES HAS OFFERED free software for a million PCs the Indonesian government is trying to acquire for students, according to the Jakarta Post today.

Gates met Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, yesterday to talk about how the country was also the fourth amongst 'piracy offenders' in Asia. He was also there to renew Microsoft's 2006 deal to supply software to the government and to add another University to its growing international network of proprietary training centres.

The newspaper reported that Gates promised free software, "if Indonesia could make a deal with Intel chairman Craig Barrett, who will meet Yudhoyono in Jakarta next week".

The government was trying to buy a million PCs for under $200 each to get more computers in education. Indonesia had one PC for every 1,000 students. It aimed to have one for every 20. So the deal might not quite bridge the digital divide, but at least it throws a rope near the far bank.

Microsoft's push into Indonesia and other Less Smug Countries (LSCs) pitches US industrial might against European guerrilla software innovation.

USAID, the US federal overseas development fund, supports a tech innovation competition run by Microsoft in Indonesia that attracted 100 proposals last year.

The software giant has also since 2006 established a network of 110 Microsoft Innovation Centres in 60 countries, the last of which it launched in Jakarta yesterday, which provide training and encourage firms and students to use Microsoft software. It now has five such centres in Indonesia.

The Europeans on the other hand have given €0.7m to the Flossinclude programme to encourage homegrown opensource development in Asia, India and South America.

Rishab Ghosh, an opensource guru at Maastricht University who helps run Flossinclude, said that Microsoft was being forced to take the "drug-pusher strategy" to Asian markets because of competition from government-supported open source initiatives.

"They give free software to governments, but they are not going to keep it free forever. They'll start charging, and then they make it difficult for you to migrate because of their proprietary standards. That's the classic lock-in strategy of the monopoly," said Ghosh, "In the long-run, you have to pay the company that you are dependent on."

After his meeting with Gates, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, gave a heart-swelling speech about how IT could "fight poverty", "raise the dignity of man", and ensure no less than the "survival of the human race".

"We must promote technology that will reinforce, not lose, our common humanity," he said.

This was once the philosophy that led One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a scheme to get cheap laptops the into the hands of African school children, to choose the open source Linux operating system for its machines. Open source software was supposed to spawn a network of do-it-yourself software engineers and local repair shops across LSCs, instead of spods trained to fill the corporate coffers of a US multinational. But OLPC has since said it might drop Linux for Microsoft's Windows. Sales of Linux laptops weren't going too well, the Wintel giants were charming LSC governments with a competing model of cheap laptop, and people were pirating Microsoft software anyway.

Gates, renowned for his tycoon philanthropism, used his trip Indonesia to promote his vision of Microsoft as the means by which impoverished peoples will raise themselves up on the crutches of knowledge and modernity.

Microsoft's pitch is also identical to OLPC's once egalitarian call to action. Microsoft's proprietary training centres would be a "sparkplug...empowering citizens with IT skills and nurturing strong, local software economies".

Giving free software to LSCs would also help Microsoft solve the piracy problem in Indonesia. It merely repackages Microsoft's old policy to piracy in LSCs, which was to let it ride because it got people locked into its software. Gates may as well gift sand to the Arabs. µ

See also
The Jakarta Post

Indonesian blog on Microsoft's last MOU with the government

Schmaltzy Microsoft promotional video about its vision for tech-no'logical education for LSCs

The same news story, written for speakers of Australian