Bazaar Expanding : Encouraging Developer Communities in the Developing World

Crystal, I think there are really three issues here: First, whether it is possible for people to make software without computers. Second, whether there are primarily economic obstacles to getting people involved in making free software. Third, whether there are non-economic obstacles, otherwise known as cultural obstacles, to be overcome, and whether those can be stated in non-culture-specific terms.

As to the first, I think we should probably agree that it is difficult if not impossible to make software without computers. The problem is sometimes poverty and limitation of resources, but quite often now, and almost always within a decade, the problem will be not that people have no computers, but rather that the computers they have prohibit programming. Manufacturers all over the world are competing to sell people objects capable of being self-developing systems that are deliberately crippled. They increasingly use OS designs for handsets and tablets that not only aren't self-developing, but enforce memory management models that make programming almost impossible. They provide mobile devices with all sorts of applications, but not terminal programs that would allow programming on remote devices.

If every smartphone and tablet were equipped with a Putty-like combination of SSH and Xterm, not only would everyone have access to more secure, more private, proxy-based browsing that leapt national firewalls, they would also have a tool which (with shell access somewhere else) would allow remote programming activity that would lead directly to FOSS participation.

One of the primary reasons Richard and I put such emphasis on the "installation information for user devices" component of section 6 of GPLv3 was to discourage as far as we could with the weight of GPL'd software the creation of hackable consumer electronics, so that people in the world who can only afford one digital computer (such as a mobile phone) would get the chance to become effective and useful programmers. You don't mention anywhere here how the greed-structured nature of capitalist technology is creating this part of the problem you are concerned with, nor do you mention anywhere a reason not to believe that the hardest part of the hardest problem is, as usual, best exemplified by the dead anti-hero Steven P. Jobs.

(I must say that I take your Rwandan story very differently than you do. When in Rwanda half of the students in even the most privileged educational institutions have access to computers at home, you know how far the process of putting computers and the Net everywhere has gone. In what year did that become true of the US?)

On the second point, I do not think that the question is how people who make free software would make money. The global IT giants alone, let alone all the commercial, industrial and financial enterprises they serve, could absorb several hundred thousand more free software makers immediately. Labor market constraints that inhibit globalization of many kinds of valuable activity have little effect on collaborative software effort, and programming (unlike many kinds of network-connected service business activity) does not require high-bandwidth infrastructure. In any capital city in the world, including in Africa, if you had a collective of a dozen or more free software programmers with proven skills, you could get them hired to perform project work at prices that would be lavish by almost all local-society standards. Soon, that is with ten years, the labor exchanges necessary to make that work simpler to get, including the reputational capital systems necessary to allow programmers working in arbitrary places to demonstrate their track record as free software contributors to potential employers, will have come into existence, and the barrier to individual free software entrepreneurialism will be quite low.

Third, well, there's third. Your essay presents no analysis of cultural obstacles, because it doesn't acknowledge the existence of cultural obstacles because it has nothing to say about culture. I think, as I've already indicated, that this is a mistake. In my slight experience with free software and its adoption around the world, I've seen societies and states behave very differently from one another, but very explicably in historical and cultural terms. This is true also, I think, at lower levels of demographic granularity.