Re: Contextualized software, cost of download

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:08:21 -0700, Bill Gillis wrote

> Thought you might have interest in article found at link below:
>http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2008/06/17/bridging-the-african-digital-divide

My reading of the article is that there are two kinds of issues
1) end users pay a lot for the download time
2) limited bandwidth, affecting more-or-less everybody: "Businesses and
institutions also struggle; universities, for instance, need to block sites
such as Facebook, iTunes, and YouTube in order to keep their Internet
bandwidth available for scholarly research".

Let's talk about  the second point here.  If institutions suffer from
b/w bottleneck, will they be willing to donate some b/w to downloaders?
I can (just about) imagine a university  being happy for its students
to obtain free software over its internet connection, particularly if 
it is related (even vaguely) to the curriculum, but why should external 
users be allowed to use a scarce resource?

What about a 'caching toaster'? I mean  a CD-recorder at the back (or
may be at the front...) of  some sort of a web cache, aka a 'popular free
software repository'.  It makes no sense to 
download the same program over and over again each time another
user wants his/her own copy. Ok, this makes the 'toaster' more
complicated and expensive, but in places with  existing IT support
(universities, larger libraries) this should not be a major issue.

Janusz Lukasiak
freelance IT consultant
janusz@eumx.net

Received on Friday, 20 June 2008 15:27:08 UTC