OStatic

Open source enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Knowledge Tree announced quite a generous offer today. Every time a customer places an order over $4,500, the company will plant a tree in Africa on their behalf. Food & Trees for Africa (FTFA) will do the actual overseas planting and the customer will receive a certificate outlining details of the contribution made in their honor.

Lindy Grobler, Marketing Manager at KnowledgeTree says partnering with FTFA was a natural choice. KnowledgeTree was originally founded in South Africa and maintains a base of operations there, we felt it was important to support a local organization. After researching several African environmental programs, we chose FTFA because of its commitment to both environmental sustainability and neighborhood beautification.

This week brought the news that IBM and Canonical have partnered on a suite of very inexpensive desktop applications aimed at netbooks for businesses in Africa. The suite of software runs on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system, and, as CNet's Lance Whitney notes, offers open-standards-based e-mail, word processing, a spreadsheet application, communication tools, and social-networking features. There will also be features allowing users to collaborate in the cloud.

If you look at the pricing model for this offering in conjunction with the low prices of netbooks, this sounds like a very viable way to offer users good functionality while avoiding the much greater expense of Windows-based systems equipped with proprietary applications. In fact, as I've been reading the details of the plan, I wonder why the folks behind the beleagured One Laptop for Child initiative didn't see this coming.

Few things are more heartbreaking than the notion of children without access to healthcare. While no one denies that there's a tremendous need for better healthcare options for American children, the U.S. provides for emergency care, vaccinations, and other basic needs. Children in many other countries aren't so lucky.

IntraHealth International works with nations across the globe to provide the training and infrastructure communities need to solve public health issues within their own country. One initiative, IntraHealth OPEN focuses on using open source technologies in impoverished areas because of its accessibility, adaptability, and versatility.

IntraHealth OPEN recently announced the launch of the OPEN Remix project, an intriguing new partnership with artists in the recording industry that it hopes will help put the latest open source technologies directly in the hands of health workers in Africa.