Open Solaris is Big...in Afghanistan

Interesting post about Open Solaris and its user group in Afghanistan - and why GNU/Linux hasn't made much impact:

I'd like to propose an OSUG for Kabul, Afghanistan. It could be called "Kabul OpenSolaris User Group" or "Afghanistan OpenSolaris User Group". We don't want to lay claim to the whole country, but I'm pretty sure there's no-one apart from us who does UNIX here.

The initial participants of the OSUG are Abdullah Ghaznawi, Said Adil Hashemi and myself, Said Hakim Hamdani. We all work at the same place (http://www.medical-kabul.com/) and since I brought OpenSolaris with me to Afghanistan, I was able to get both of them interested enough that they are going to make their systems dual-boot with OpenSolaris and WinXP

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We are located in Kabul, Afghanistan and as far as I know we're the only Solaris users around. The computing infrastructure in Afghanistan is still pretty much in its infancy and I am doing what I can to get people to try out UNIX (best of Solaris of course) and use it for their daily computing tasks. There's some Linux around here, but I'm not too fond of that and having seen a single (!) copy of Solaris 10 in the software market the other day, I sat down with Abdullah and Adil and we decided to try and get people more interested in OpenSolaris.

I'd be surprised if Open Solaris managed to remain more popular than GNU/Linux, given the latter's momentum; but it may be that the situation in Afghanistan is so exceptional that personal recommendation of the kind mentioned above is more important. An interesting space to watch.