Licence fees and GDP per capita

Licence fees and GDP per capita: The case for open source in developing countries by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh First Monday, volume 8, number 12 (December 2003), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/index.html

this note argues that the controversy over total costs of ownership (TCO) of free vs. proprietary software is not applicable to developing countries and other regions with low labour costs, where the TCO advantage lies with open source, and the share of licence fees in TCO is much higher than in high labour cost countries.

If they are starting from scratch anyway, it is just as cost effective to learn open-source software as proprietary versions.