I am now operating out of a friend’s office in Shanghai. Since shifting to the office, I was able to introduce a number of open source applications to their systems.
Firefox is now running in 2 notebooks and 2 desktops. Thunderbird is on the 2 notebooks. ClamWin is guarding the 2 desktop. Other applications that I had installed includes 7-Zip and PDFCreator.
The great things is that these application all have choice of chinese interface, so the user feels right at home when using.
Firefox is especially helpful in replacing Internet Explorer, since no one here has any idea about sercurity update. IE is a gaping hole where all the virus and spywares are entering.
I believe open source has great future in China. In a country where there are still a large number of people using the computer for the first time, there is no unlearning of old application and relearning of new applications. What is lacking though is people evengelising open source. Rampant piracy is another issue which makes it much easier to get pirated commercial software then open source softwares.
As for our office, after showing the people how to use the applications, they are up and using in no time. A small win for open source.
0 Responses to “A small win for open source”