10-year old Bengali girl foiles forcible marriage

A 10-year-old girl in West Bengal stood up against the collective might of her family to stop her marriage and moved on with a pledge to study and be self-reliant.

The parents of Kakali had fixed her marriage for Saturday, but the girl boldly told them that she wanted to continue with her studies. She took the help of the local administration and social organisations to prevent her marriage, local reports said Saturday.

"My aunt had arranged my marriage with the consent of my parents. I told them I don't want to get married. I want to study," said Kakali, a Class 5 student of Naraharipur Sadacharan High School in North 24-Parganas, some 100 km from here.

When Kakali learned that her father, Nepal Debnath, was arranging her marriage, she expressed her unwillingness and stopped eating.

But her parents did not pay any heed and continued with the arrangements for the wedding for April 27.

Finding no other way, Kakali informed her neighbours and then approached the district administration. She urged the panchayat (village council) and some social bodies to save her. The district administration intervened.

Joint block development officer of Boangaon, Subhodip Goswami, along with panchayat head Santosh Das, stopped the marriage with police help. The girl's parents were interrogated.

The panchayat head has promised to take up the responsibility of Kakali's education. And the head of the local school, Abu Bakar Mondal, vowed to launch a campaign against child marriage.

The real cost of the $3 Windows - MS Office suite

LEAVE it to Bill Gates. There’s a reason he’s the richest man in the world.

In a visit to China last week, he announced a program that would sell a $3 bundle of Windows XP and MS Office to governments in poor countries that subsidize computer purchases by students.

“All human beings deserve a chance to achieve their full potential,” Gates said in announcing Microsoft’s latest program to bridge the digital divide.

It was a public relations coup and a shrewd business move besides.

Now $3 is a great price for MS Office 2007, even though it’s the Home and Student Edition that doesn’t have PowerPoint. But Windows XP Starter Edition is a crippled version of a five-year-old operating system, with networking disabled and multitasking severely limited.

So the software isn’t great, but it’s good enough to do the job.

Unfortunately, the “job” isn’t just personal productivity, it’s technology lock-in. It’s all about creating a new generation of computer users who are hooked on Windows and programs that run under the proprietary operating system.

Microsoft isn’t shy about this goal of “reaching the next billion” computer users and tying them in to its technology.

“Many of these people we think are going to be consumers down the road,” said Orlando Ayala, senior vice president for Microsoft’s emerging segments market development group.

A closer look at the $3-deal also exposes software pricing as an artificial and arbitrary affair. Why sell software priced at hundreds of dollars for just $3. Why not $2? Or $5?

Even the Starter Edition is an arbitrary, marketing-oriented creation that artificially limits the functionality of software. It harks back to the day when some marketing geniuses at Intel decided to sell a version of the 486 processor with the math co-processor disabled, simply so it could sell the same chip at a lower price—without having customers who were willing to pay more for it complain. Crippling a piece of software so you can sell it cheaply makes just as much sense.

Significantly, Microsoft’s $3 offer comes at a time when the open source Linux operating system is becoming increasingly popular as a free alternative to Windows on desktop and notebook computers. By aiming its program at developing countries, Microsoft seems determined to head off Linux in markets where the free alternative is most likely to thrive at Windows’ expense.

But in the same week that Gates announced the $3-subsidy, a major software milestone passed without fanfare.

There was no Times Square countdown. No whiz-bang demo by an aging technology guru. No big advertising campaign or clever TV commercials. With a refreshing lack of marketing hype, the latest version of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, was released to the general public on April 19.

On that day, the Ubuntu home page was replaced with a bare page under a headline that read “Ubuntu 7.04 - Well Done.”

There were just two sentences under the headline: “Thank you to everyone who has helped make Ubuntu 7.04 a reality. Thousands of you have helped code, test, translate and promote Ubuntu and everyone can celebrate today’s release.”

Below the note were links to servers in 30-odd countries where the 700MB file (an ISO disc image) could be downloaded.

The lack of hype wasn’t the only thing that set Ubuntu apart.

Bucking industry trends, Ubuntu developers delivered the latest version of the operating system on time, as promised. In stark contrast, Microsoft missed numerous launch targets on its five-year road to Windows Vista, and even Apple has had to push back the June release of Leopard, the new version of the Mac OS X operating system.

The on-time delivery of Ubuntu 7.04 is yet another sign that the open source approach to software development works. Unlike the traditional approach in which one company hires all the programmers and controls product development, open source projects are farmed out to volunteer programmers around the world, working cooperatively over the Internet.

And Ubuntu 7.04, code named Feisty Fawn, is not crippled software. It’s a sophisticated, fully functional, modern operating system that is more secure, and arguably more efficient than Windows Vista. It also comes with a boatload of excellent software, including an office suite that does what MS Office does-all for free.

So why would a developing country want to pay $3 per PC when it can get a much better deal for free? The real cost of Microsoft’s $3 offer to developing countries is much higher than its price tag suggests. The real cost is getting sucked into a proprietary world and the loss of choice that open source software would bring.

Russian Billionaires unhappy with Forbes list

Businessmen who made the Forbes list of Russia’s 100 richest people are not at all happy that the magazine decided to publish their names and to disclose the size of their personal fortunes. They say that it is now unfashionable and even dangerous to be a “public billionaire”.

The moneybags are upset both by the methodology that was used by Forbes, as many believe that their fortunes have been overestimated and by the possible consequences of appearing on the list which is headed by the jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The Vedomosti business daily talked to several of those whose names appeared on the list on conditions of anonymity. “They [the magazine] couldn’t find a worse time and place… Personally the only reaction that I get from discussing personal wealth in our country is a high blood pressure,” said one of the newspaper’s sources. Another billionaire lamented that “appearing on such a list is bound to make the entrepreneur a prime target for the law enforcement authorities”.

The anxiety expressed by Russia’s businessmen is by no means groundless as there have already been precedents set abroad. In the spring of 2003 when Forbes published a list of the 100 richest people in China some of them were later arrested.

The “Golden hundred” of Russia according to Forbes consists of 36 billionaires, the personal fortunes of the remaining 64 businessmen who made the list amount to hundreds of millions of US dollars each. It should be noted that when on 27 February the U.S. edition of Forbes published a list of the world’s richest people, it included only 25 Russian businessmen. This means that “according to Forbes” over the last two and a half months the number of billionaires in Russia grew by 40 percent and the size of their combined fortunes increased from $79.4 billion to $110 billion.

Among the newcomers to the list are the president of Alfa Bank Petr Aven, head of Millhouse Capital David Davidovich, top manager of Sibneft Andrei Gorodilov, Russian senator Valery Oif, whose wealth is also attributed to Sibneft, the wife of the Moscow mayor, Elena Baturina, and member of the Russian parliament Alexander Lebedev who also serves as the president of the National Reserve Bank.

Among the businessmen who were most upset by the publication of the ratings were the billionaires who made their fortunes at the Sibneft oil company. Roman Abramovich, David Davidovich, Andrei Gorodilov and Valery Oif were positively furious, writes Vedomosti. The newspaper quotes the head of Sibneft’s public relations department Alexei Firsov who said: “The rating has no connection with reality, the numbers are wildly speculative, the methodology used by the magazine is clouded in darkness.”

Leonid Fedun, vice president of Russia’s largest oil company Lukoil, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes to equal $1.7 billion, and sources close to the former head of the Gazprom natural gas monopoly Rem Vyakhirev, whose fortune according to the magazine is worth $2.4 billion, say that in reality their personal wealth is much less than Forbes asserts.

The only person who claims that his personal fortune has been underestimated is the exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky. According to the magazine’s calculations today he owns $620 million. But, speaking to Vedomosti Berezovsky said: “In the middle of 1990 Forbes estimated my wealth at $3 billion. This means that either I spent $2.5 billion or their current estimates are incorrect.”