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Microsoft announced on Fri­day that it’s launch­ing ver­sions of Win­dows and Office in the Incan lan­guage in Bolivia. This promises to help close the dig­i­tal divide between the 2.5 mil­lion Quen­chan speak­ers (about a third of the pop­u­la­tion) and the bet­ter sup­ported Span­ish speak­ers in the country.

If we are to see tech­nol­ogy as a force for good (which per­son­ally I do) then open­ing up access is fun­da­men­tal to suc­cess. This is an area where open source has promised so much (and deliv­ered rea­son­ably well all things con­sid­ered). Because users have access to the code, they can tweak it for spe­cial­ist use and port it into new lan­guages (if they have the skills them­selves of course).

But, of course, Microsoft’s soft­ware isn’t cheap. This was high­lighted in a quote from Bolivia’s For­eign Min­is­ter, David Choquehuanca:

“We con­grat­u­late Microsoft for hav­ing facil­i­tated the use of com­put­ers in our own lan­guages, but we have to advance toward sys­tems that are more open because we still have to pay a license fee (to use the soft­ware) to Microsoft.”

Bolivia is not a rich coun­try. It’s some $6b in debt. Almost two thirds of the pop­u­la­tion live beneath the poverty line. And the Quen­cha are among the poor­est groups. Given these fac­tors, pay­ing out for expen­sive licenses (even if they are in your native lan­guage) is unlikely to be an option.
You have to applaud Microsoft’s ini­tia­tive. Its soft­ware is still the dom­i­nant force in busi­ness and giv­ing minor­ity groups access to it can only help improve their oppor­tu­ni­ties. All we need now is a free devel­op­ing world edi­tion that deliv­ers enough func­tion­al­ity to make a dif­fer­ence with­out bank­rupt­ing the user in the process.
Source: Reuters

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