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Software Livre, Anyone?
tbray writes "They just had this
huge OSS conference in Brazil. One good write-up by Simon Phipps is here. And hey, down there, OSS and Java play nice together."
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Here's a quick babelfish translation.
"Book" in French. The term "Software Livre" might confuse some of those who speak French.
No data, no cry
No, they just had this huge free software conference in Brazil. Even robotic translation software gets this right. Lots of people around the world understand free software as being distinct from "open source software" (OSS). Not everyone is so eager to back a movement which caters to the percieved needs of businesses.
Digital Citizen
Portuguese is the major language of Brazil.
I know this post will be modded offtopic, but i don't care:
The last Brazilian aggression outside the country was in 1822, I'm told.
Actually, Brazil (plus Argentina and Uruguay) fought against Paraguay in a war that started in 1864 and ended in 1870.
After that, Brazilian troops fought bravely against the Axis (and their allies) in World War II - in Italian territory and alongside U.S. troops, to be more precise.
Fixed link:
http://tinyurl.com/2srd5
"Livre" is Portuguese (the Brazilian national language) for "Free"; "Libre" is the Spanish/French meaning the same thing, but I digress.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
I must object. Brasil is home to many beautiful and clean women. I can tell you from personal experience that it is quite possible to have intimate relations with a lady from Brasil without acquiring any sort of disease or ailment(other than depression when you have to fly home).
Brasil may have a lamtentable HIV problem, granted, but it certainly isn't in the same risk category as some Asian or African countries.
That being said, I severely doubt that many slashdotters will have much to fear from HIV infection rates in Brasil or in any other nation. There are exceptions, I suppose . . .
Bad troll. You should be more subtle next time. Nevertheless, I take the bait.
While most of South American coutries speak Spanish, Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, and Surinam (a.k.a. "Dutch Guyana") do not. Major cities in Brazil were founded by Portuguese, mainly jesuitic missionaries and goldwashers. The massive italian migration the troll referred to happened between mid-XIX century and early XX century, due to coffee farms, and while it had great impact on our culture, it was certainly not enough to make Italian (or some dialect of it) very popular, not to say official, here.
World History 101, fifth door to the left.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Brazil is walking the correct path to be the most advanced free-source country in the whole world, and yes, that includes the US. Why?
Government backing is one factor. We have our own version of GPL (which is partially incompatible with our legal system, but not void), the LPG (rtf file, Portuguese). It was made/rewritten from the GPL by the Brazilian Advocate Union. Yes, it's the single one that every lawyer must abide to and respect. The Creative Commons license is in the process of being translated and becoming an official licensing term, as in government-backed and even encouraged.
Yes, there are projects to yeld tax cuts to people and companies that use/distribute/publish free software.
DMCA is null and void here. Yes, we have to follow international copyright laws but you won't be fined if you hack your cable box or DVD player to learn a bit. Piracy? I can tell, it's pretty much the same as everywhere, with the exception of audio CDs that is rampant around the country. So BMG wants to try out a new content protection scam^H^H^H^Hscheme, well baby it won't work. You have a moral choice, to buy a crippled, legal CD for R$30 (around US$10) or the full monty, "generic" version for R$5 (US$1.70). And don't forget we earn A LOT less than our yankee friends. Allow me to say, I am a doctor and I make less than 1000 US monthly.
Speaking of generic, that's one law that was pretty much shoved down US companies and they hated us for that. But Time magazine once praised Brazilian health treatment to AIDS, citing it as an example to Third World Country. What happens is, any medicine patented prior to 1992 lost the patent. Other pharmaceutical companies are allowed to fabricate and distribute them. This was "bad" for them but the final blow comes next: if there is a strong public health interest, the government may cancel any other medical patent.
Think AIDS.
Yes, AIDS treatment is free around here. Government-backed laboratories reverse-engineer and produce zidovudine, lamivudine, 3TC, protease inhibitors and whatnot. They are given (as in gratis) to registered AIDS patients.
You may say it's a harsh thing to do and laboratories want/need to make a profit, well, they do. But when public health is significantly more important than personal gain the table will turn. You know what? The laboratories whined at first, but now they kinda agree with that. They lost their rings to keep their fingers, as an adage says.
In music/entertainment, I can say for sure that many of the most prominent musicians like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso are strong backers of the "music wants to be free" mindset.
Hey, don't take my word on that. Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons director, recently told the press that Brazil is becoming the world's epicenter of Free/OSS dicussion.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Here goes a non-fish translation of the leads only. It's Sunday morning and I'too lazy to do the rest.
FISL: 35 coutries represented and all Brazilian states represented in the Forum.
Software Livre [FISL]), that ended today, June 5th, in Porto Alegre, had 4,854 attendants from 35 countries, comparing to the 20 countries of last year. All 27 Brazilian states were represented, as were 380 municipalities in the country. Of the total number of attendants, 1,014 people were representing firms or public instituions, a record number according to the event's organization.
5th FISL: Gilberto Gil (Culture Minister) preaches "land reform" in the field of cultural propriety.
Free culture was the prevalent idea in the launching of the Creative Commons project in Brazil, with the presence of the Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil [1] in a debate int the PUC-RS Event Hall, in Porto Alegre. The encounter, in the end of the friday the 4th's afternoon, was one of the most attended of the Forum.
5th FISL: Lecturers criticize press coverage about Free Software
In the conference "Free Software in the Press", that took place in the last day of the 5th FISL, the debaters reached the conclusion that there are many flaws in the spreading of the theme by the comunication media.
The coordinator of special projects of the e-government of the Municipality of Sao Paulo, Joao Cassino, said that the coverage about Free Software in the press has a lot to do with journalism ethics. "It's very easy to distort technical themes, but we cannot deny journalism is a politics weapon," he said.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
GNU Classpath
GCJ/GIJ
Kaffe VM
Jikes Java compiler
SableVM
Java-GTK
Documents about how to compile and use QTJava and KDEJava
What else do we need? How does all this not play well with Free software? We've got the tools, why not use them?
a lot of people have this wrong idea about brazil they think we are all like Rio de Janeiro (the city), or that we all live in the Amazon Forest, but that is just plain wrong. Most of us don't live like Disney's Zé Carioca (or whatever the name he has in US) or among indians in the amazon basin.
if you look at the states of São Paulo (SP), Paraná (PR), Santa Catarina (SC) and Rio Grande do Sul (RS)(where the SL meeting took place), you will find people that live ~almost~ like in US or in Europe.
in RS you will meet the 'gauchos', a proud people, who resemble the argentinian Gaucho (cartoonized by Disney's Panchito), and in both RS and SC you will find cities that were founded and mantain the good old traditions of Germany, Italy, Poland and Açores (the islands in the atlantic, owned by Portugal)
so, calling this people 3rd Country is like calling them primitives, not well technology developed, even though we are as well developed as most of US great cities, or more develeoped than some European Countries.
we might have something to learn here and there, but at some stuffs, you (US citizens) are the one who could learn something
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
(BTW, there are several other versions of the top languages on the linked site, but NONE of them show native French speakers outnumbering Portuguese speakers, so :p The asterisks indicate there are more than a single version of the language included, since Chinese "dialects," for example, are mutually incomprehensible and ought to be considered separate languages, IMHO.)
Back on topic--Lula is doing a great job, even if some of his leftist buddies feel a bit betrayed (re. GMO soybeans, for example) and the official embrace of open software is really going to help people. There are internet cafes running Linux, so those without computers still have opportunities to learn. In the US, many people are willing to pay extra money for software to save themselves some labor. In Brazil, labor is the cheapest resource there is, so people are more willing to take the time to learn how to use Linux rather than pay a Microsoft fee. Eventually Linux will be as easy to use as Windows, but I don't know how good that is. The farther you are abstracted from what the computer's doing, the less you understand what's going on under the hood. How much you want to bet that Brazilians learning Linux hands-on are going to be way more likely to know how to troubleshoot a malfunctioning internet connection than someone who only knows XP.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
You should choose better your sources: this op-ed in the NYTimes has been internationally acknowledged as a bad piece of journalism. Did you know there where no sources for his accusations on Lula?
But, then again, people always choose what to believe. I won't be the one trying to open our eyes.