Two issues divided campers at Africa Source 2 like no other. Perhaps these
were meant to. One was: FLOSS is still too complicated for non-profit
organisations and schools to use. The other: It's more critical to translate
FLOSS into African languages, compared to training to use existing (FLOSS)
software".

Obvious. Issues like these split public opinion at Africa Source 2 along the
the spectogram of various possible positions.

From New Delhi, Arun Mehta argued that FLOSS still needed to be much more
accessible to the disabled. Others saw it differently: "What have NGOs done
to make it more user-friendly? This is not software you buy; this is
software you create," said one voice.

Derick Odembo agreed that it was still difficult to migrate. Dwayne from
South Africa claimed his grandmother had learnt to use Firefox (the superb
browser) and she was a hundred years old! Buy that?

A webdeveloper was concerned what tool he could use to replace Macromedia
Flash. Someone else argued that everytime FLOSS is used, it's one more
crucial vote in its favour.

Rudi from South Africa argued strongly in favour of those who "taught a man
to fish, rather than just gave him a fish". He said he's seen more people on
the FLOSS side teach others and work towards a solution than those who just
complain about usability.

Ivar Mugabi of Uganda cautioned against "doing nothing but training guys
when they don't understand the stuff". Deborah Aknwande, also of Uganda,
made her point. Somebody else laughed, "Hey, this is
everybody-understands-English stuff," said someone on the side which
stressed on the importance of translation and localisation of software.

Dirk, who worked as an eRider for seven years stressed the 70:20:10 principle for NGOs and
non-profits. He called this a "very important formula". And, he stressed 10%
of resources needed to go to hardware, 20% to software, and 70% needed to go
to training!

Charles Loku of Uganda called for a more detailed form of localisation. Why
not call it M'bata (Swahili for "duck") rather than Mandrake, he asked.

Alaa stressed that language questions are "very complicated", and connected
with literacy and politics. "There is much more to localisation than just
translation... Translation is good, but much more is needed. We need more
users and more techies. We the Arabs have to solve our own (Arab)
localisation issues. If we have training and more users, we would be better
able to handle this," he suggested.

Someone felt that people stressing localisation generally came from larger
tribes, and were people who used well documented languages. What happened to
smaller language groups, he asked?

And thus the debate raged.... only to show that FLOSS has its many shades of
grey.