Dear All, I have an assignment that will definitely strengthen the consumer but for that to happen much sooner,better, and a lot easier I need your help. A practical example: Cyber cafes around town infringing on Microsoft Windows 2000 have less than 1-month to purchase XP or Vista else they will be arraigned in court by the company and/or its agents. Anyone who wants to purchase "licences" for the Windows 2000 cannot do so because Microsoft says they no longer support that product. This means that one has to upgrade to Vista, quite an unpopular product according to this study: http://www.windowsvistaweblog.com/2007/09/22/2-percent-of-companies-upgraded... Meagre revenue generating Cyber cafe are expected to spend more 15 million in new hardware to support vista in addition to Microsoft software licenses else they face legal action. Fortunately, Free and Open Source Software run very fast on old computers. (Mine is 533 MHz! and it runs great) In total, Kenya has about 700,000 computers most running on whatever windows and it is also said that the level of infringement is 85% (see below). If every computer were to run on "licensed" windows, them the capital flight from Kenya would be 700,000(PCs) x 17, 000 (windowsXP) = Kshs 11,900,000,000 (approx.20 billion). Add Shs 17.5 billion for Microsoft Office retailing at Kshs 25,000 per copy making a total of shillings 29.4 billion (about the amount Finance Ministry hopes to get from sale of Safaricom shares?) Free and Open Source Software has free OpenOffice and hundred of thousands of other free software... ------------------------------------------------------------- Country GDP/cap (US$) PCs('000) Piracy ------------------------------------------------------------- Kenya 1,200 700 81% S.Africa 13,300 3,100 35% USA 44,000 200,000 21% Malawi 600 60 85% ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Source: Speaker at Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation's "Connecting Rural Communities-Africa Forum" at Nairobi. (I prefer use of "license infringement" as opposed to pre-condemning "piracy") In order to assist me in addressing this consumer and development and related issues, please fill and send back the attached questionnaire.For more info see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_to_Knowledge_movement. I have attached the questionnaire in two of various "save as" formats OpenOffice Word Processor offers ( Microsoft Word".doc" and OpenOffice .odt). Please fill and return ASAP to help me make a more informed Rapid Assessment Study. asante. Alex __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com