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Open Source Disaster Relief

Posted on 19/1/2005, 12:23 am, by Colin Charles, under General.

We all knew that they were evil, but who thought Microsoft would refuse to give Windows licenses away, because the apps built on top of it were going to be open source based?

This is exactly the way they behaved when they refused to give XP licenses for notebooks that were to be used for relief work. Instead, they thought it was more than appropriate to charge $135 per XP license. The Sri Lankan’s were trying to build a disaster management system, open-source based, called Sahana. As described at the Sahana sf.net page, it handles all forms of crisis management, including refugee camp management (including match-making based on supply/demand), lost persons database, and more. They are looking for PHP/Mambo, Java, and MySQL blokes to help design the system and continue development.

I even noticed a post about running Mambo on an iPaq running OPIE. There’s a rather nice write-up about it at Linuz Gazette; at least now we all know, that pre-teen model is an evil bastard.

microsoft.com tsunami relief efforts
Microsoft, supposedly helping the tsunami victims in need
If anyone’s interested, The Electric Lamb Mission, a site setup within 24-hours using Drupal, with folk from Australia, KL, Sumatra, and Singapore all collaborating via e-mail, IM and SMS. Their aims are to “become an e-facilitation portal for mission-critical humanitarian and disaster relief initiatives by non-aligned volunteers.”

So alas, open source saves the day yet again, IBM are still heroes for giving away hardware, and Microsoft come out looking like crap.

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