Microsoft claims Africans don't understand OSS

Wow, this blog is meant to be a fairly lighthearted place (disregard that huge post a few weeks ago about experts:P) but this really made me sad. Microsoft is freaking out about the fact that South Africa is adopting ODF as a government document standard. With barely concealed prejudice they went ahead and made a statement more or less claiming that SA is to primitive to be able to fully understand OSS and it's benefits and that they should not focus on open source on the OS level but rather on the application level. Obviously they are fine with SA doing open source as long as they do it on top of Windows. They even have the audacity to claim that SA will somehow lose money by the fact that a patch or an application that they create can be picked up by a foreign vendor (such as Redhat or Novell.) As opposed to all the profit they will make by handing over their money directly to MS? The whole statement reeks of sour grapes and an attempt to play on other countries prejudices of Africa. Maybe someone should tell MS that Overt racism isn't the best PR trick these days.

Quick glossary for those who don't understand what I'm talking about:

ODF: Open Document Format. An international open ISO standard for digital documents. Used by virtually every major office application except Microsoft Office.

OSS: Open Source Software. Software licensed in a way that makes the source code freely available. This means anyone can modify and redistribute the software as long as they in turn grant others the same rights. Linux and Firefox are the two most well known examples of OSS.

OS: Operating System. The underlying system that all applications run on top of. Windows and Linux are examples of Operating Systems.

SA: South Africa

MS: Microsoft

I hope that clears it up a little bit.

PS:
As perspective to the article I want to mention that Ubuntu linux (Currently the most popular distibution of Linux) is lead by a South African.

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