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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.
"Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger"."
A point most modern countries should take note of. When licensing fees make up such a large part of your operating budget, it seems foolish to simply accept it and continue with business and not look for other options.
I'd prefer my country spending a little bit less on licensing fees and a little more on it's people.
Of course, without the newest version of Office, I suppose they couldn't make neato graphs to justify the latest software licenses expenditures.
-Teiresias
You run a government agency in Brasil.
You use your budget to:
A. Pay a team of OSS programmers for IT support and in the meantime create jobs and promote domestic-grown-owned-designed and controlled IT resources.
B. Pay for comercial software licenses and thus cut jobs and have the Brasilian tax-payer money go to some trans-national company and meanwhile turn your back on domestic-grown-own-designed IT resources.
MS will shove enough free or discounted mackerel down your throat so you don't learn how to fish and remain somewhat hungry.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Yeah, you're right, it's not as if he co-founded the EFF or has a fellowship at Harvard Law or anything like that.
hmm.
fnord.
The budget for the fome-zero (zero-hunger) program of hunger erradication among porr families is R$1.68 billion (around US$630 million)
Source: Orçamento do programa Fome-zero (budget for the zero-hunger program)
http://www.camara.gov.br/internet/diret
its a official document from Camara dos Deputados (brazilian federal legislative house, deputy chamber)
The stimated value spent by the brazilian government (cites, states and federal government) is R$2 billions (around US$ 740 millions). that info is from the consulting firm 4Linux http://www.linuxplace.com.br/sqush_place/10589872
There is a specialized secretary for IT strategies (Secretaria de Logística e Tecnologia de Infraestrutura) that is collecting data to present "official" values expent with licences.
Some numbers:
- Budget on Federal IT spending: R$1,9bi (~US$ 720 mi)
- Budget to spend on hunger and income rdistribuition iniciatives : R$1,1bi(~US$415mi)
- Brazil's GNP in 2003: R$1,5trillion(~US$565bi)
- National Debt/GNP ratio: 58%.
- Money saved from not acquiring licenses: R$28mi(~US$10.5mi)
Some ranting:
- There is way too much hype about this technological policy in Brazil. The largest part of public spending in IT has never been on acquiring office licenses or MS-Windows stations. The largest piece of the pie has always gone to enterprise-wide systems. Unysis and Oracle are everywhere in government servers, and they get the big bucks. 28 million compared to a billionaire budget is pocket change. If they wanted to actually reduce costs, they would have to go after these guys.
- This stupid leftist (real left, not the Democrat Party kinda thing) government decided they should go after Microsoft because they are part of the Evil Empire. As an example, Lula refused to meet Bill Gates at Davos, just to show that they don't need MS anymore. He might get huge support from the open source crowd, but still think it was moronic attitude, politically speaking.
- Famine or hunger has hardly been a real problem in Brazil. Poverty and terrible distribution of wealth certainly are a bigger cause of concern. And the budget shows that: 0,1% of the budget spending hardly makes a "War on Hunger", as our beloved president wanted.
- As someone said above: Brazil is not Sudan. It has a huge, diverse economy, and is not by dictating one particular policy that they are going to solve our bigger issues.