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tres3 writes "Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rights. It discusses everything from battling with the international pharmaceutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman
stated that India's political commitment to free software is second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government."
Wow, a spelling error that still makes sense on a completely different level.
american corporations/government will never let something free like linux to take such a market-share that it would shut microsoft down. same thing with telco companies. there are such great alternatives out there. VOIP, way better internet alternatives to shitty 3MB cable (japan has 100MB fiber to house) american corporations hold us back, i think it's time we FIGHT! P.S. i live in america, and actually work for fed govt.
President Bush Supporter
Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rigths. Discussing everything from battling with the international pharmacutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman stated that India's political commitment to free software is, second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government. Later that week Stallman donned a robe and a halo made out of a compact disc and declared himself "Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs" but was surprised to be upstaged when Gilberto Gil, Brazil's newly appointed minister of culture, said: "this whole process that led to the computer, to the personal computer, to Silicon Valley, this extraordinary degree of cognition that arose from the intersection of math and design and the crystallographic structures of quartz was made possible by acid trips." It even has its fair share of MS bashing for those whose goal in life it is.
The story was pending for over five hours. I think they were waiting for someone to submit one that didn't equate drug use to computers! I was merely quoting the Brazilian Culture Minister (p. 4). Just a quick FYI.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
It's a good thing that developing nations are not overrun with banks of lawyers and corporate-puppet politicians out to abuse the legal system" in order to "enforce IP rights" and essentially abuse the legal system. Either that, or they have different more important priorities to take care of rather than pursue extreme protectionism based on artificially created property, like's happening in the developed countries.
Whatever the case is, it's good to see *somebody* take a sane stand on the issue of Shared Knowledge, which has been that way for a few thousand years in human history now.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
it is a race to the bottom on cost. Yes their are benefits like Walmart to the pocketbook but long term are they good?? I use the most expensive platform on earth and the most closed (ie hardware, software), Apple's Macintosh and find it to be far more useful than Linux. The main problem I have is Linux doesn't innovate, it copies what Apple and MS do so it is always in catch up mode. One can't make money doing that unless you rape people on the service contracts....
Which was exactly what America did when most of the IP was coming from the "Old World". Back in those days, English authors were up in arms about the blatent and widespread piracy of English books in America because of lax IP laws and enforcement. It was only after America started producing stuff on its own that it became an IP Nazi. India et al. are only doing to America what America did to the Old World when it was still young and developing.
Your last line, while inflammatory, really does put unrestricted capitalism in perspective.
You may also consider that consumer debt is the newest form of slavery. The beauty of this particular form is that the slaves are responsible for their own problems and upkeep, they just send money. The best part is that the new slaves get in voluntarily.
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Forget not that labor is very cheap in Brazil. So, the TCO is mostly the cost of what you have to pay to the owners of the software.
There aren't "many, many more" windows admins than Linux admins in Brazil; there aren't that many of either. Brazil is a developing nation. I have good hopes for it, and it could be a major power in pushing Linux (its economy is already approaching Britain's in size).
There seems to be a strong "cooperative" sense in Latin America, as opposed to in the US. A friend of mine from Argentina started an organization called Cooperarte (Cooperar + Arte). I asked about the name, and he mentioned that every other organization in Argentina these days, it seems, has a reference to cooperation in it.
Now Brazil has, by a significant margin, elected a Socialist leader (Lula), who if anything is criticized for not being socialistic enough. Brazil often hosts counter-WTO events; there's a strong sense of "fighting for the common man", instead of for corporate interests (especially foreign corporate interests, which have been seen as trying to use Latin America for cheap labor and resources)
Congrats to Brazil for taking a stand on so many issues; I wish Brazil the best on its attempts to make Open Source their standard, and offer them my congratulations on their recent successful rocket launch (it's about time there was a Latin American space program!)
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
Being a brazilian, I think I have something to say...
I don't know what you mean by "hardware piracy", but most of the hardware sold in Brazil is contraband from China. I mean, Dell, Compaq, HP, Epson and others sell hardware here, and these are doing it the right way, paying their taxes and really helping brazilian economy.
But if you go buy MoBo's, NIC's, video cards, memory, HDD's, you're almost 100% sure to be buying product from contraband. It's the only way to get a cheap computer here. Tax rates for imported electronics are absurdly huge!
The same goes for software. Think of a brazilian worker paying 350~400 dollars for a modest Celeron... How do you think he's gonna buy Windows and Office? Windows XP Home costs 220 dollars and Office 2003 Standard costs 470 dollars! You can almost buy 2 computers with that money!
That's why it's so easy to buy pirated software in Brazil. People know what they're buying. They don't need manuals, boxes and stuff: the pirated CD's are CD-R copies with cracks included! And they cost 3 dollars each.
It's absolutely important that the brazilian government commits to open source and free software. If children start using Linux at school, they're not going to buy pirated software in the future. It wouldn't even make sense because they'd know for sure that they can have an equivalent for free.
Also, the brazilian goverment is switching their systems from Windows to Linux. I think it's the right path to follow because I pay my taxes and don;t want to see that money going to Redmond for something that they can get for free.
And, for the "rightist" people over here, the current president's party is "kind of leftist" (the Worker's Party). Contrary to what you would believe, my fear is that the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (the former president's party) do something bad in the future because there's a great chance they'll come back to the govern.
Biopiracy, n. The smuggling of species of plants, animals and fungi, typically from tropical, 3rd-world countries to temperate, 1st-world ones, for the purpose of isolating substances which are then patented as inventions and levied as taxes on the same countries where the substances came from.
Yes, kids, it exists. You'll find it nowhere in US and European media because it's not convenient to anyone, but people are arrested regularly for it in international airports of developing nations for it (including the selfsame Brazil). The pharmaceutical industry isn't quite the paragon of correctness and hard effort you make them out to be.
In fact, many programmers will probably "give away the razor and charge for the blades" by creating software frameworks then charging reasonable fees for custom enhancements as users desire them.
Examples: Fluendo, Canonical, and Imendio. They're all pretty new companies, so while we may not know how sound the business model is, we'll know soon.
no. in the face of profiteering that is keeping your population in poverty. Do what you need to do, i.e. make them yourself, and then worry about the legality later.
After all, isn't that what drug companies do? If they need their return on investment so quickly that they rush drugs through testing and into market before fully investigating all side-effects, then why the hell should the Brazilians or South Africans worry about jumping the gun on patent terms?
And as for no drugs without the drug companies, the most important drugs in the world (penicillin, smallpox vaccine, etc) were all invented by academics, in UNIVERSITIES.
Drug companies are not charitable institutions. For every hard-working scientist in a drug company, there are at least four MBA's in suits who's job is to pimp the drugs for as much cash as they can grab.