Following up to that last presentation, I've uploaded here the slide deck I used to deliver a training workshop at the Sanabel 2007 conference in Sanaa, Yemen.

CC licensed again, ppt for the usual reasons.

I monitor media pretty extensively for open source news, and I remember when this article came out in November actually! A party I work with has - with all good intentions and in the interest of fostering debate - called it out as noteworthy, which has given me a chance to rebut some of the FUD and misconceptions in that article around open source. Time has been a constraint as I have had to provide rapid turnaround, but this should do for a quick rebuttal.

Searching BBC news (always elegant to use the same source for counter argument) for mention of "open source", restricting the search to the news section (I hope we're not missing any news about open source in sport!), and sorting by relevance yields 25 pages of results at ten hits per page.

Now, let us look at the first 3 pages (or 30 results) to find how many pro and anti open source articles there are:

PRO open source: 19
NEUtral: 11
ANTI open source: 0

This article was supposed to run in Linux Magazine, but the Editor-in-Chief felt the style was too different for the magazine (which I actually agree with). He's been kind enough to provide me with a copy, since I had lost mine to a hard disk failure.

Egypt has a history stretching back some 5,000 years. Sadly, open source had not figured very prominently in Egypt for 4,994 of these years, though to be really fair there's at least 4,800 of those 4,994 for which Linus, Babbage, and the Egyptian people are guiltless.

Linux adoption and penetration has lagged in Egypt. Today, people are just discovering with the typical euphoria of a movement just hitting the fringes of mainstream the wonders of Linux and open source, and yet it has been a long road from zero to Penguin. The story starts with a LUG, or rather without a LUG.

Yemen exists primarily, one suspects, to provide a definition logic by providing a diametric opposite. As I post this I'm sitting in Sanaa airport waiting for my flight to Amman, and I would be enjoying my first wireless connection in a week if it were not slower than the dialup I've had to make do with.

Out of the 20 odd million people, something like 50% (60 something persent of men and 30 something percent of women) are perpetually drugged on khat. It probably affects the remaining 50% given that the environment can't be too stimulating when one out of every two citizens is stoned as a matter of lifestyle.

This is not a critical post, it is observational. A friendlier people than the Yemenis are hard to find. The picture herein attests to this, taken in a village in the southern governorate of Abyan.

abyan kids 2

This article was written with the objective of understanding how traditional Islamic law would or does regard intellectual property, with the emphasis here and there (as relevant) to open culture and free software. I am not a lawyer, and this article was written with the support of some beer (though not too many); my claims to authority, weak as they may be, are living in Egypt for some 17 or 18 years and having played a solid role in creating the Egyptian Linux Users Group. I am open to discussion (that's what the comments are for!) and will revise this article when time and reasons avail themselves.