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John Barlow Pushes Open Source in Brazil
greysky writes "This story on Foxnews.com reports that as part of the larger World Social Forum, Barlow spoke on how open source software can help alleviate financial problems of developing countries: "Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger"." NPR talks about how Brazil plans to switch 300,000 machines over.
This country has many problems. Windows is the least important of them. Our problem is one of ideas.
All of the media (with Veja magazine as the sole exception) and the academia is terribly biased to the left, even more than in the USA, and we have no big right-wing celebrity like Rush Limbaugh to keep some balance. Most journalists are soviet era nostalgics. About every politician here is for the "social", and it's really hard to find one who defends capitalism and free trade. Our taxes are insanely high, but no one has the balls to suggest a radical tax cut like what GWB did in the USA.
World Social Forum? A disgusting bunch of hemp-smoking teenage commie fucktards. They can't bring any solution, because the shit they have in their heads is the cause of these problems.
Circumcision is child abuse.
> "Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger,"
Wait - does the Brazil government spends that much?
Or it's Brazil as a country (their enterprises, organizations, citizens, the government, etc.)?
In case it's the latter - well yeah why would enterprises spend anything on hunger (they already get taxed enough and it's not their job anyway).
And private spending (citizens and enterprises) shouldn't be that bozo's concern anyway.
If it's the former - let's not forget that:
a) Spending on hunger has nothing to do with spending on software.
Imagine this: "Already, Brazil spends more on OSS than on hunger". Or, "Brazil spends more on biotechnology than on hunger".
So what?
b) A handsome 30% to 50% of whatever they spend ends up in hands of Brazillian VARs and others in the value chain.
If they spent all the money on OSS (which is impossible), they would have saved just a fraction of it.
And, as others observed, it's not like they pay for all the software anyway - probably just a fraction of commercial software is paid for and the rest is actually helping them increase productivity for free.
All in all, that article full of shit.
It is unfortunate that even shittiest and most superficial articles rarely get the trashing they deserve.