6104 comments
2357 subscribers
6265 on Twitter
Subscribe! Feed reader E-mail

Fantastic explanation of cost of software

From We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin:

“Every license for Office plus Windows in Brazil – a country in which
22 million people are starving – means we have to export 60 sacks of
soybeans,” says Marcelo D’Elia Branco, coordinator of the country’s
Free Software Project and liaison between the open source community
and the national government, now headed by president Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva. “For the right to use one copy of Office plus Windows
for one year or a year and a half, until the next upgrade, we have to
till the earth, plant, harvest, and export to the international
markets that much soy. When I explain this to farmers, they go nuts.”

Now _that’s_ a fantastic way to make the cost of software really
visible to people. Translate it into tangible stuff!

その猫は私のそばで寝るのが好きだ。 The cat likes to sleep beside me.

On Technorati: ,

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/2692

On This Day...

  • 2013: Weekly review: Week ending March 29, 2013 — Blog posts Weekly review: Week ending March 22, 2013 Debugging my brain: typos (write-os?) in my sketchnotes Emacs Chat: Carsten [...]
  • 2012: Practising faces —   Deliberate practice is an important part of learning how to draw. I’ve been taking advantage of the ease of tracing [...]
  • 2011: Running the Selenium IDE testing plugin with Firefox 4 — Selenium is a web testing framework that allows you to test web applications involving HTML and Javascript. The plugin hasn’t [...]
  • 2010: Thinking about travel — I’ve just submitted my application to IBM’s Corporate Service Corps, which sends IBMers to emerging countries. The volunteers work with [...]
  • 2009: Ethics and egos in virtual assistance and relationships — Leesa Barnes is very firm about this: outsourcing social media content and relationships is not okay. I mostly agree. oDesk and [...]
  • 2008: You have received a painting from Sacha
  • 2008: Best Practices Conference – April 1, Day 2 — I feel much less intimidated now.  That Best Practices conference is small, almost cozy. Thanks to social networking–and the blog, [...]
  • 2006: From Kathy: Capybara night — Ladies and gentlemen, I present my sister, the cook. <grin> Happy April Fools! :) I hope you weren’t victim to some completely [...]
  • 2006: Triscuit — I _have_ to stop eating these. They’re nice, they’re crunchy, they remind me of granola bars… But I _really_ have to [...]
  • 2006: Graduate House — I went to the common room to study, and I heard someone playing “Speak Softly, Love” from The Godfather. It turned [...]
  • 2006: Salmon and mashed potatoes with Steve and Mike — Steve’s out on a weekend pass, so we celebrated with an impromptu cooking party. I defrosted and panfried some salmon steak. [...]
  • 2005: Went to bars — <gasp> End of the world, that. Ended up going with my sister, my godfather and his nephew. We went to the Absolut [...]
  • 2004: Interesting courses for this summer — CS 129.6: EXTREME PROGRAMMING: M-F 9:00 – 12:00, CTC-215 (3 units) This is a seminar course that focuses on a relatively [...]
  • 2004: Related software: Ideakeeper, Z-write — - Ideakeeper: Hyperlinked notes, access from anywhere, but limitations on hyperlinking and only grabs clipboard contents. However, automatically/manually washes clipboard entries, so [...]
  • 2003: squidstat
  • 2003: Code fragment repository? — http://sourceforge.net/snippet/ Also, see http://dumbcode.org . Is http://www.freshbones.net up yet? (Update 2003.12.30: http://sourceforge.net/snippet is alive and well. http://www.freshbones.net is still not up. http://dumbcode.org is [...]
  • 2003: Blender export — Oh joy, Blender and Python go together nicely. Useful links: - Blender Exporter – From the site: This Python export script dumps [...]
  • 2003: Computer Science Unplugged — education — In the thread “CS for 5th graders” on the ACM SIGCSE members mailing list, Beth Simon writes: The unequivocal winner is [...]

Get the highlights as a PDF!

Stories from my Twenties: Highlights from a Decade of Blogging

Free sample!