One hopes that the Government of Bangladesh has been paying attention to the World Trade Organization negotiations. One of the main demands that Western countries made was that Least Developed Countries recognize their Intellectual Property Rights, by which they meant the copyrights and patents of US and European corporations. So far, pharmaceuticals and agriculture have been the most prominent arena of the Intellectual Property Rights debate, as most LDCs realized very quickly that they would never have the money to pay Western prices for anti-AIDS drugs and unscrupulous American patents of basmati rice. Under the WTO, LDCs will lose the right to use all such intellectual property without proper payment to the copyright owner. Violations of Intellectual Property Rights will result in a country like Bangladesh facing severe consequences in the form of trade restrictions. But a potential Intellectual Property Rights disaster for Bangladesh has remained unresolved: the widespread use of unlicensed Microsoft software.
Practically every single computer in Bangladesh is running unlicensed Microsoft Windows operating systems as well as unlicensed Microsoft Office software (Word, Excel, etc.). Paying for these licenses is inconceivable given the expense involved. A single copy of the latest version of Microsoft Windows (Windows XP Professional) costs $300; the latest version of Microsoft Office (Office XP Professional) costs $580. Altogether, this comes to $880 per computer, or about Tk 51,000, which is more than the hardware cost of a new desktop machine. The cruel joke is that if you consider the cost of the Microsoft software we're all using, nobody in Bangladesh can actually afford to use a computer. There are at least 100,000 computers in Bangladesh; Microsoft�s license fees would be around US $88 million for these. At the same cost, we could give new computers to every school and college in the country. Plus, additional upgrade fees will have to be paid every two years to keep all this software up to date. Given that the number of computers in Bangladesh is increasing rapidly, within a few years half a billion dollars of Bangladesh's precious foreign exchange reserves will have been paid to Microsoft.
It should be noted that under the WTO, violation of International Property Rights by the Bangladesh government could easily result in trade sanctions against us. All that is required is that Microsoft pursue the matter with US trade authorities, which will happen sooner or later. The point to remember is that it is not just Bangladesh which pirates Microsoft software. This happens in all LDCs, as no one in the Third World can afford to pay so much for software. Collectively, LDCs are depriving Microsoft of billions of dollars of license fees. Given the large amounts of money involved, it is just a matter of time before Microsoft decides to get tough with all us Third Worlders. When this happens, Bangladesh had better not be caught napping. LDCs have been so caught up in the furor over American patents of AIDS drugs and basmati rice that we have not really decided what we�ll do when the issue of pirated software use arises. In 2005 the US government will also probably be looking for any excuse to restrict Bangladesh's garments exports and protect the American textile and apparel industry. Under the WTO they will can only impose quotas and duties in retaliation for unfair practices. Software piracy is one of these "unfair practices", and will be a very convenient excuse for them if they want to impose trade restrictions.
Fortunately, there is a solution; all we have to do is start using free software. There are in fact thousands of programmers around the world who are just as unwilling as we in Bangladesh to pay the high cost of Microsoft licenses. This group of independent-minded individuals is known as the �open-source� community, committed to the laudable goal of creating software that is freely available to everyone. The term "open-source" is used here in contrast to "closed-source" software like Microsoft's which is controlled by its copyright owner. Working together, the open-source community have created Linux, a completely free operating system comparable to the latest versions of Microsoft Windows. Furthermore, to support the open-source community's challenge to Microsoft�s Windows-based monopoly, Sun Microsystems has made StarOffice, its own �Microsoft Office�-like software, free and "open-source". Using Linux and StarOffice, one can legally do everything one is used to doing with unlicensed Microsoft products. Documents can be written in StarOffice Writer, which works just like Microsoft Word; spreadsheets can be made with StarOffice Calc, which looks just like Microsoft Excel. E-mail and web-browsing can be done with either StarOffice�s mail program and browser, or with the latest free version of Netscape. StarOffice can read Microsoft Office documents, so people changing to free software can still use all of their old files. This very article was written on StarOffice, not Microsoft Office. An added bonus is that Linux is almost virus-proof.
It is imperative that we and other LDCs move from being Microsoft-based to Linux-based as quickly as possible. In this regard, Bangladesh is actually much better off than many other LDCs; fortunately, we have a considerable amount of Linux expertise. Since Linux system administrators were highly prized in the dot-com driven US job market of the last few years, almost all of the training centers which now litter Dhaka offer Linux courses. Local adoption of Linux will give these graduates opportunities for practical experience which they will need in order to acquire lucrative jobs abroad. All that remains is for the government to create a pro-Linux policy. The simplest way to do this is to ban unlicensed Microsoft software from all government offices and computers. The fact that government offices use pirated software is extremely embarrassing anyways: software piracy is already illegal under Bangladesh copyright law. The government�s flouting of its own laws in this respect only go to show everyone how ineffective government �policies� are in Bangladesh.
Easing the private sector's transition to free software will require a two-stage migration. The Microsoft-Office-to-StarOffice transition is very easy and StarOffice will even work in Microsoft's Windows operating system. So in the first stage, the government should ban unlicensed use of Microsoft Office. All hardware sellers should be legally required to install StarOffice in each new computer. It will take less than an hour for people to learn how to type and print out their letters using StarOffice, after which they will be left wondering why they were using Microsoft Office for so many years. This should be done immediately. A year or two after StarOffice has been widely accepted, hopefully right before 2005, unlicensed use of the Microsoft Windows operating system can be banned entirely. Hardware sellers would then be forced to sell every new computer with both Linux and StarOffice pre-installed. Although Linux's graphical user interface is actually very similar to Windows for basic tasks like copying and saving files, it will take people a little time to get used to the new operating system. But this is the easiest way to wean people off of Microsoft products. Unlicensed use of Microsoft Windows will probably never be totally eliminated, but Bangladesh will be in a much better position to fight American attempts to impose software-piracy related trade sanctions.
Once the government actually decides to move to Linux, the change can happen almost overnight. Acquiring the software is no problem; installation discs of the latest and greatest version of Linux, Red Hat Linux 7.2, can be purchased for less than Tk. 200 on Elephant Road. Once broadband internet is widespread, further upgrades can be dowloaded for free. The new version of StarOffice, called OpenOffice, is already freely available on the internet and installation discs will no doubt appear on every street corner soon enough.
Moving the government to Linux will have other long-term benefits. Western countries have benefited a great deal from e-governance, which generally involves bringing government offices and tasks on-line for greater efficiency and transparency. However, the cost of e-governance is prohibitive in a Microsoft world. To create a web-based voter registration system, for example, would require at least a database to record the voter lists and a web application server to create the web-pages with which voters would actually log on to the system and store their names, addresses, etc. Using Microsoft software such as SQL Server and ASP could cost thousands of dollars for each application. By comparison, Linux provides the same capabilities with MySQL and PHP for free.
Other governments are planning, or have already started, the move to free software. These include Britain, Germany, Denmark, South Korea, Singapore and China. The time has come for the Bangladesh government to also move towards Linux and StarOffice. This policy will build public confidence in free software, and the result in rest of the country gradually abandoning its use of unlicensed Microsoft products. In fact, just the safety Linux provides from viruses will probably be stimulus enough for the private sector to abandon Microsoft. After all, private companies actually stand to lose tremendous amounts of time and money with each new virus that appears and threatens to wipe out all their computerized accounting systems and documents. But the awareness-building and policy-making have to start now. Otherwise, come 2005 when the Bangladesh government tries to lobby the US government for protection of its garments industry from China�s, we should not be surprised if the reply is �But what have you done to prevent large-scale piracy of Microsoft software?�.