OxBlog

Monday, June 16, 2008

# Posted 4:59 PM by Taylor Owen  

BARNETT-FIREFOX MASHUP: Taking it to a new level of geek-out, Dave Eaves combines geopolitics with open source in what is a very cool post. He compares firefox 3 download pledges with Barnett's Functioning Core and the Non-Integrated Gap countries. It appears as if there is a relatively strong negative correlation between Non-Integrated countries and pledged downloads. More interesting are a couple of more detailed observations:
Non-Integrated Gap countries with the most pledges are Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, Peru, and Indonesia – interesting list. Seems to suggest that many of the countries the US tries to isolate are actually the most connected.

According to my Mozilla friends Poland (yes, Poland) was the first to hit the 100K pledge mark. Many new Core countries are adopting Open Source en mass to avoid paying for expensive Microsoft software. Open source may be offering them a cheap way to increase connectivity and integrate with the core faster, and on their terms. Fantastic outcome.
As Dave notes, it would be useful to actually model this, and it requires data scaled by pop and host of controls. But its pretty cool nonetheless.
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