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Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend
soneca writes "From the last two years, Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has turned the country into a tropical outpost of the free software movement. The government is switching from costly operating systems made by Microsoft and others to free operating systems."
US needs to follow that path.
Who will guard the guards?
This story was posted yesterday too, wasn't it?
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
Its great to see governments spend their taxpayers money wisely. Also it helps their trade balance positively, it makes sense in so many levels to not use Microsoft software for every other country than America, so im surprised only Norway, Germany and Brazil are seriously rolling it out. And for the projects i heard about in Norway and Germany its just a few counties. But, 5, 10 and 15 years from now i would be very surprised if Microsoft had a dominance of even more than 70% of the shipped OSes.
The fact that Brazil does not have any major IT industry that will benefit from Brazil only using propriatary software.
Though i do admit to not knowing the ins and outs of Brazils software business, i know that governments in contries that do have those IT-Giants are under all sorts of pressure to accomodate for their companies.
Something that would be far more interesting was if a Microsoft nation would adopt similar policies.
What will be really interesting is to see which benefits they do reap from opensource, and whether others will follow suit.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
GPL code has already ended up in unauthorized programs in the US and other countries which recognize IP. In any case, the GPL is about copyright rather than patents, which is what your link was about. This is no reason to keep open-source products out of Brazil or any other country.
Given the president's insistence on using FOSS products, I think most people assume he will help them out if GPL copyright is violated.
I don't believe Slashdotters are against copyright, but they are against patents. I suggest you read a few of the comments Slashdotters have posted before trolling.
FTA: But the preference for open-source software has been controversial, with critics inside and outside the government saying Mr. da Silva's administration is letting leftist ideology trump the laws of supply and demand.
I really fucking hate this. This is the typical newspeak propaganda used by companies terrified of losing their stranglehold on consumers by loudly bleating "Communist" into the air in order to get support from the more paranoid fringes of society, such as politicians who get kick backs from such companies.
What Supply and Demand is this guy talking about? Does he mean to infer that all those people should remain uneducated because they can't afford to buy some bullshit company's overpriced product? Tell that to the people yourself, you cunt. Also tell them that buying Microsoft's Windows will make them even poorer than they currently are, since the only way Microsoft is ever going to sell Windows at a low price is to sell some ultra crippled piece of shit such as the Starter Edition which no one wants.
(P.S. Mods, +5 informative, thanks)
Something more to think about: Microsoft Office XP Standard costs $479.95.
$479.95 isn't that much in USA. I bet most of the people here make *at least* this over a week - probably much more. However, right here, getting that much money *a month* is considered more than average. The minimum wage is like 1/10th of that.
This is not to say 'the country is a poor country, boo-hoo sell us cheap software' (although it *is* a poor country). The thing is, values here are different; a software like that is *too expensive*. You can buy food here for a tiny fraction of how you'd pay for in on USA. Wages here are also a lot cheaper than they are in the States - even for the same job with the same qualifications. It's just that not only the country is poor, but living cost is also low; the values and the scales are different. You can get to a really good grill restaurant and get totally wasted with so much good food - and spending less than us$ 10. The same thing would cost around us$ 150 on USA - with the same restaurant chain! (Fogo de Chão - there's one around Detroit I think).
When selling software, people don't think "ho well, I'll use one third/half/quarter of my salary to pay for this software..".. they usually think "ho well, I'll use 1/2/3 months worth of salary to pay for this software.. well nevermind, I'll just buy a copy next corner for $3".
There are lots of wrong stuff going on the government of this country. And one of them is the coice for Microsoft Software. My dad used to work for the state a while ago.. Basically the entire office ran on pirated win95 with microsoft office, and of course, they had no 'central' support or IT management so I used to go there fix their computers. Switching to some linux based solution with open office (or whatever) would pose an obstacle at first but would be just as it was before on the long run. With less virus and trojans, that is (I remember I spent an entire weekend getting the entire office rid of macro template virii - man that was fucked up).
I, for one, commend them on this choice. On the long run, this will prove to be the best choice, contrary to the FUD the local Microsoft is spreading.
Of course, money saved from going to Microsoft's pockets will end up going to some politician's bank account, so who am I fooling. Nothing of this matters.
The US administration and/or Microsoft will make sure that his political opponents get plenty of advice and money.
All Linux needs is for the infection rate to be lower than the identification/repair rate.
If the viruses cannot spread faster than they are identified and dealt with, then they will "die" and Linux will be "immune" as a whole.
But that doesn't include trojans. Trojans will be with us forever. They use social engineering, not flaws in the OS. Most of the email "viruses" that you see on Windows are actually trojans.
But trojans can be dealt with much more efficiently on Linux than on Windows. See the next section.That's mostly solved already. Look at Ubuntu. Anyone can install anything. But the system will ask you for the root password.
The extra steps that people would have to go through (assuming no Outlook-type email app becomes popular that runs installs from email attachments) will cut down on the number of email trojans that get installed on Linux.
The more work the trojan writers have to expend
+
The more work the end user has to expend to get it installed
==
Fewer trojans installed on Linux.
Spyware crap that the user installs himself is a different category (Bonzai Buddy).
Nope. The desktops can be configured to appear almost identical to the Windows desktop.
The switch to Linux would be easier than the switch from Win2K to WinXP's layout.
Yep. They'd have to be re-trained. But salaries wouldn't need to go up. It takes less time to manage Linux systems than it does to manage Windows systems.
The Windows-only apps are the only real block to migrations. But, if you have a migration plan, you can deal with these apps over time, before you actually move off of Windows. Simply start porting your apps to an Open Source database and scripting language now and don't do any new development in ASP/ASP.Net.
Open Source is a strategy, not a drop in replacement.
Linux easily beats Windows here. Linux's scripting ability (from shell scripts on up) is beyond anything you've seen in Windows (unless you're running perl on Windows).
The only thing Linux doesn't have is the group policies capability of AD. But if you're deploying Linux, you don't really need those. Everything is locked down already.
There are a few Open Source projects, but nothing that is a drop in replacement for Exchange. That still needs work.
You can't even get 100% compatibility when using MSOffice. My HR department has tons of trouble with resumes that come in, in .doc format, that just don't print correctly. There are too many variations between printers and fonts and so forth and those all get included in the documents.
BUT from a GOVERNMENTAL standpoint, they SHOULD be demanding plain text files. Having your data in a proprietary format (which may not be supported in future releases) means that you can lose those documents and the data contained within them. That is unacceptable.
Frankly, I find the connection as annoying as can be. First, there are a LOT of folks who equate communism with Soviet Russia and the nutjobs who run many communist dictatorships. Seeing this connection causes them to equate communism with evil. Of course, you probably know this. Whether or not you like it or agree is immaterial to this conversation, so forget about that for a minute.
The sad truth is, however, that many people hate communism for some very poor reasons. Personally, I think that communism has some good points, but that too is immaterial.
Now, with your description of OSS, I must assume you mean F/OSS, which is different. Free OSS is exactly what you say it is, but OSS may cost money. There is NOTHING in the license that requires it to be free of cost, just that the source is available (and I think at no extra cost). To me this is important, because it allows a company to sell the software and make a profit. Yes the customer may take the software, make changes and resell it, but it generally doesn't make sense to do that.
The advantage of open source for the customer is NOT the ability to modify & sell, but in the ability to modify & use. I am not a serious developer, and so I will probably never modify an office suite or linux distro source to fit my needs, but I like to know that I can.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)