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Brazil Moves Away From Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Citing economic as well as social reasons, Brazil's government is opting to move away from Windows, opting instead for Open Source (read: Linux) solutions. Interestingly, Microsoft's representative in Brazil decries this as a movement away from freedom and choice..."
The main reason why Linux was being adopted outside of the United States was because of its cost, even with $2.50 per copy for Windows XP in 3rd world nations, linux decreases in cost per unit the more machines you install it upon.
The other reason was SuSE and Mandrake, both European and not from the United States. Which plays well in the EU. There is a mentality amoung many leaders in France and Germany that want to see the "United States of Europe" superpower and waining themselves from Microsoft could give Europe a leg up in technology as Linux catches on in SE Asia and the 3rd world.
Now with SuSE in the hands of a NA company, I wonder how that will impeed linux adoption. Oh course, IBM would love to see this happen as the premiums would return to hardware, not software.
I think Linux will be catching on internationally in the next couple years on desktops big time. It probably will be longer in the United States.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
We keep reading about the yet-another-government that said "oh, dear, Microsoft is sooooo expensive, we should use Linux instead."
And then there's an item in the Wall Street Journal about someone from Microsoft striking a deal with the country's government. They get big discounts, free software, maybe some gifts for the schools, maybe even some investments or jobs.
So if you were running a poor country, why WOULDN'T you threaten to give Microsoft products the boot? It's a negotiation!
Cem Kaner, Professor of Software Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology
I see this is a trend. A lot of people is moving away, if not moving to Linux, from Microsoft.
.NET. That really surpise me as he's working for a all MS s/w house, his entire team knows none other than MS's product, and he's a 100% Microsoft zealot. Turn out they were seriouly considering dropping MS deployment as "Microsoft Server is being too insecure".
A friend of mine called last week asked me for my opinion on choosing J2EE and
I found it amusing: a company who work with Microsoft very closely all these years is being forced to switch, even when they must start from the beginning.
It's odd how software has become akin to daytime television. Every time Microsoft loses a market lately, it's the result of some failure of democracy and Natural Law. If a gas station were to lose it's business to a competitor down the street, would he chalk it up to the oppression of OPEC and chime about how such competition is akin to the spread of fascism in Europe in the 1930's?
I think it goes more to show how Microsoft feels entitled to each and every market they enter, and that they're not trained to respond to the market around them as they're so used to controlling it. If they lose business in some market, it's not because their prices are high and their products are inferior, it's because some other market force "has it in for them."