The issues being considered central to this debate are:
* Opportunities and drawbacks of FOSS for developing countries –
the roles of government, civil society, business in the process
* FOSS & Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – stretching the
development dollar for scaling-up impact
* The global Intellectual Property Concern – Business monopoly of
first world nations software giants versus third world
collaborative efforts.
* Enabling legal/regulatory/policy framework for country specific
strategic evolution FOSS.
* Open-source processes outside the software sector – Free
Medicine, Seed Bank, Open Access, Open Archiving etc.
* Comparison of proprietary software vis-Ã -vis FOSS in terms of
technical merits –reliability, stability, and vulnerabilities,
especially in the context of national ecurity.
* FOSS versus Public Domain Software and Freeware – the Total Cost
of Ownership (TCO) of FOSS.
* Understanding why individuals contribute to FOSS projects and
what motivates FOSS developers to “donate” their time and are
these motivations different in developed and developing
countries? Are there constraints, especially in developing
countries, that could be addressed by government or private
sector interventions?
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Link: iosn.net