[Ilugc] Re: Kerala logs Microsoft out of schools
- From: siva.ilugc@xxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Sat Sep 2 19:04:50 2006
On 9/2/06, Binand Sethumadhavan <binand@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 02/09/06, Toufeeq Hussain <toufeeqh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
when
they go out looking for jobs, they are going to have problems.
What you learn in schools is your foundation for higher education. It
is the path, not the destination.
IMHO, they've done the right thing, for the wrong reasons. They'll
polarize the debate by creating a David-vs.-Goliath analogy, as well
giving an anti-MNC, anti free-market flavour to the debate.
It's got nothing to do with M$, really. It's basically a question of
the optimal use of public money - IMHO, it is best spent on creating
the conditions that allow a local services industry to flourish. In the
long run, FLOSS is the best choice to allow that to happen.
If you go the proprietary, packaged route, the bulk of the wealth-
creation will probably not be locally created, but rather at the
location of the shareholders of the vendor - which is likely to be
mostly in the US (there aren't many Indian shareholders in M$,
if any).
I'm not against globalization, free trade or any of the other
bogey-men - however, I've always got the best deals with the
local merchant next door, even in the US - and never from
mail-order or direct-sales outfits like Dell.
It almost always pays to enrich the local merchant - he's
likely to spend the money in the neighbourhood. That lowers
the frictional coefficient in the economy by a much larger
amount than by shipping your money out to a faceless
company elsewhere in the world with huge administrative
overheads - your money goes towards subsidizing those
administrative overheads, including executive vacations in
Hawaii, etc.
It's a no-brainer, and it's got nothing to do with communism.
-Siva
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