How Linux Helped 5 Poverty-Stricken Governments
Imagine you are the minister of education of an impoverished country, with a limited budget to improve your schooling system. You are not aware of such thing called “Open Source” what would happen? You would probably end up spending thousands on software to equip your school’s computers.
Spain
Luckily the local government of Extremadura, Spain are more technically adept than you are. Extremadura has a big problem: its population density is very low, with 1 million people spread over 40,000 km2, most living in provincial villages scattered around the region. In reality, Extremadura has only three “big” towns, Mérida, Badajoz and Cáceres. This demographic structure had severe consequences on development of the telecommunications and IT sectors. Private companies don’t see Extremadura as a lucrative market, it would require a big initial investment since the region is huge (larger than Belgium), providing little or no profitability due to the low population.
Also, Extremadura is one of the poorest regions in the EU, and the cost of proprietary software needed to run the network was just too much for us to bear. So the government decided to use free software; in the beginning due to its low cost, but soon they realized that free software is a powerful tool to provide “technological independence” and avoid reliance on global conglomerates and monopolies.
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