I'm looking out for some good examples of how Free/Libre and Open Source Software could help bridge the "digital divide", particularly in the context of the less-affluent countries. Specially in South Asia or the rest of Asia.

One of the major problem being faced by south asian countries like India is bringing PCs to the rural schools. Schools in our villages do not have resources to purchase computers even at a rate of Rs.15k per piece. So we find most of them using second hand machines. I had read somewhere few years back that the OEM license of Windows did not allow you to sell the OS along with your PC? I don't know whether still that clause is present or not. If so, a second hand PC is worth nothing unless you load it with a newly purchased Windows or a pirated copy of it. Even then, a licensed version of XP may not run on it due to the lack of hardware power required for it.

So "GNU/Linux" or "* BSD" are the best options for them. Besides that, with free/libre OS comes hundreds of packages with varying degrees of choices thrown up at the user. All at no extra cost. This is not the case with the other OS.

Another area of interest is the open standard of document formats available in free/libre word processor and spreadsheet software. This is very important not only for rural public, but also for the urban masses. With an open standard based document repository, your knowledge base is never going to be obsolete. That means you need not indulge in expensive data conversion tasks every year or pay through you nose to get new versions of compatible software.

In particular, the issue of computer obsolence seems to be a critical subject. But what with quite a few GNU/Linux distros seemingly going the bloatware way? Regards, FN

This is due to an ongoing effort from GNU/Linux distros to please or convert Windows users into its fold. This makes a lot of business sense. Unless a Windows user finds the system user friendly as per his/her definition of it, he/she is not going to use Red Hat or SuSE distros. This comes naturally with some additional costs. If you want all the bells and whistles of latest KDE and GNOME, you need to spend a lot of CPU power and RAM. We need to remember that the target of these distros are new users with almost new hardware. Rural public or their systems are off their radar screen as there is not much revenue coming from those areas at present. We can't blame the distros either as you need good revenue generation to sustain yourself in this market.

But there is a silver lining. Since everything is free and open we are as powerful as a business house when it comes to customizing our solutions. GNOME and KDE are not the end of all GUIs. There are other faster window managers with less features or less bloat, depending on which side of the fence you are. Xfce (http://www.xfce.org) is one of them. The Freeduc CD used Xfce-3 which was very fast to use and provided good functionalities. The latest Xfce is built with GTK2 and is capable of supporting all the languages already supported by GNOME.

I think selection of packages for rural public is a critical part of the game. The packages which run faster on slower hardware is the way to go. But I am not sure whether current Mozilla or OpenOffice.org will make into that list. Well, one can use dillo (or links-hacked) and abiword (or lyx) as substitutes with lesser features.

-Raghu