XP Starter Edition reaches Africa

What I initially thought was little more than a story about Microsoft’s entrance in to the world of their cut-rate version of XP actually turned into a shining example of how Linux has already “been their and done that”.

Microsoft plans to make Windows XP Starter Edition available in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Nigeria from the summer.

The feature-restricted, cut-price version of Windows is already available in more than 80 countries across Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, but will be available in some African countries from July, Microsoft said last week.

The announcement comes a week after Microsoft started offering an isiZulu language interface pack for Windows XP — the first of the three South African language packs it plans to offer.

But Mark Shuttleworth, a South African open source advocate and the founder of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that Microsoft is still playing catch-up with the achievements of open source.

“We applaud Microsoft’s steps in recognising the importance of making technology available in the local language. We urge them to go even further, to catch up with the work being done in the open source community,” he said.

While Microsoft has only just released one African language pack, non-profit organisation Translate.org.za has translated the open source office productivity application, OpenOffice.org, into South Africa’s eleven official languages. The organisation has also worked on making the Linux desktop environments KDE and GNOME, and the Firefox browser, available in different South African languages.

Although Windows XP Starter Edition has similar features to the full version of XP, there are various restrictions. For example, only three applications and three windows per application can be run concurrently, and it is only licensed for low-end processors such as Intel’s Celeron or AMD’s Duron. Shuttleworth called on Microsoft to remove these restrictions.

“We urge them to remove the built-in limitations of Windows Starter Edition, so that it will actually take advantage of current hardware and allow the user to open any number of applications at one time,” Shuttleworth said. Source: ZDNet

[tags]africa,mark shuttleworth,xp starter edition[/tags]