Tropically tolerant

No, the title has nothing to do with what you’re thinking.

This is a story I read in the August 2005 issue of Spectrum magazine: The African Hacker

The African hacker

Hermann Chinery-Hesse is the chief of the tribe. I mean Soft Tribe, a software development company in Ghana, a country whose democracy was restored about 5 years ago. Like many countries in Africa, it has plenty of basic infrastructure problems. Electricity, for example, goes out very often, and internet access is expensive.

Tropically tolerant software is the term Soft Tribe coined for the technique they had to build into all their applications. The programs save as often as possible, and send the data to the server whenever there is a connection.

The technique is old; many of us were using it in the late 80s.

Human rights and technology

It turns out Soft Tribe won a 200,000-dollar project to keep records of human rights violation cases. The entire design proposed by Hermann Chinery-Hesse assumed there was a network. But only after the contract was awarded did he find out that the network didn’t exist; the human rights commission hadn’t considered that detail. So the problem had to be solved with “tropical tolerance”. But there was a bonus, a side effect nobody had foreseen. Each case is filed on the PC and then, as soon as there is an internet connection, sent to the human rights commission’s central servers and to an office in London, so as to protect the information on human rights violation cases in the event of a new coup.

Why not open source?

The surprising thing is that Chinery-Hesse develops in Visual Basic, C++, even Clipper!, on Windows or DOS
But why not work on Linux?
You’d think that would be the obvious choice in a poor country like Ghana. But the answer is surprising. The facts back it up, if you understand how things work in Ghana. Linux isn’t practical for Chinery-Hesse. “It can’t be used for serious business,” he says, because it would be too easy for an employee to use and abuse the source code of the programs.

“In Accra, an IT manager earns $100 a month,” explains Chinery-Hesse. “He has access to all of a company’s data, including backups. With open-source, he can learn to generate bogus reports. He’ll delete charges and pay himself or others money.” Besides, “if we went for open-source, we would be relegated to basically doing installation and training,” he adds. “Do I want a country of software developers or a country of installers?”

Something to think about.