Pravab

Experts claim that developing countries will reach higher rate of F/LOSS adoption in most of the sector. This results in significant opportunity of development offered by F/LOSS to developing economies. In regards to the highest use of F/LOSS by industries, education sector will lead the chart. In 2010, this sector is expected to use most of the solution provided by F/LOSS; that is 80% of the application used by education sector for educational activities would be F/LOSS. One of the important relevant factors for this is the presence of educational activities in F/LOSS at educational sector. Major F/LOSS projects are related to education industry and most of these projects are promoted from scientific field (Gallego et al. , 2008). Educational sector is well positioned to benefit from the alternatives that F/LOSS provides (Guhlin, 2007). Education sectors have accelerated the use of F/LOSS software and the leading ones are utilising it to enhance the education and facilitate studen...

Back in 1960s’ and 1970s’, there used to be special laboratory where tight-knit group of hackers spend their time writing codes to develop the best possible program. This group had their own ethics, hacker ethics and they had to honour their tradition. They used their skills not only to write a new program but to improve an existing program. Before late 1970’s, commercial manufacturers used to provide the source code along with the software. But later the companies owning the software began to close the source code (Williams, 2002; Li et al. , 2005). In 1980 while working in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, Richard Stallman had encountered problem with the Xerox laser printer. Being a software programmer, he wanted to fix the problem himself but he couldn’t find the source code to work on. He decided to visit Carnegie Mellon where the research for Xerox project was on progress. He met the professor working on the project and reques...

The Virgin Group At the age of 16, Richard Branson set up the student magazine. From the beginning his strategy was to identify the subjects that were neglected and not touched by well established companies and this gave him the competitive advantage (Pryce, 2009). In 1970, a mail order record was his new venture from where Virgin was founded. From that time on, he expanded virgin group into travel and tourism, mobile, leisure, mobile, finance etc and created a great empire – Virgin Empire consisting of more than 200 companies in more than 30 countries (Virgin, n.d. e). Branson has invested on companies with long term capital growth or which achieves long term value creation and feels this as the best approach for private companies (Pryce, 2009). Even when there were barriers in the virgin group journey, such as 1972-82 recessions, 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, Branson did not fall back. He continually expended the group into areas which were dominated by the big companies while select...