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."

Comments

Re:erm, duplicate

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is not a popular opinion on /., but I LIKE the dupes. Maybe it's editor neglect to some, but to me it's a chance to see an article I have previously missed. You say "poh-tay-toe" and I say "just ignore the dupe and STFU". :P

Re:Wonderful! So, let's kill the spammers already!

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

The US is still the world's largest spammer. Perhaps we should imprison American spammers rather than Brazilian ones if we want to reduce spam.

Brazil only produces 6.17% of all the spam in the world, compared to US's 42.53%.

Too bad there are only two outcomes

[melted]

If their IT people are anything like US federal employees, there are only two possible outcomes, unfortunately:

1. They fuck everything up beyond any recognintion
2. They fuck everything up and then go back to Microsoft, ready to pay anything MS wants them to pay.

There's no way in heck a large migration like this will succeed without top notch IT people ready to tackle the most dramatic of the scenarios. And governments (of any country) aren't well known for employing top notch IT personnel.

Re:Too bad there are only two outcomes

[iksrazal_br]

I've worked for the Brazillian government as a consultant for the last few years. A couple quick things:

1) Inside the govenment itself 'mandates' like these are mostly ignored, or not even known about, partly because of 'jeitinho' - wiggle room for everything built into the culture.

2) However, about half the developers already run linux on the desktop - most of them are Java developers.

3) Big Solaris boxes run the majority of applications, and there are still a lot of mainframes that just haven't been migrated yet. I think its a question of Intel, rather than Linux or even Microsoft. You will however see plenty of Linux servers running firewalls, Tomcat, OpenLDAP and the like.

4) That all being said, the general feeling is that Software Livre here is definetly gaining momentum. That and Creative Commons. This is all highlighted every June at the excellent international Software Livre conference in Porto Alegre. Good government and international speakers every year.

5) As an expatriot North American who had worked in the USA as developer for some fortune 100 companies, I can safely say that at least here in Brazil most developers are consultants, and on average are much better that anything I seen in States - perhaps due to that good jobs here are hard to come by.

iksrazal

Re:Why is OSS equated with Leftist ideology?

[Koyaanisqatsi]

While I understand your point, one argument often used is that the government should not mandate all govt-purchased software to be FOSS.

The idea is to follow the "best tool for the job" argument; you favor FOSS because it gives you orders of magnitude more freedom, but if no adequate (and polished) software exists for the task at hand, look at the proprietary options.

In the euphoria of some speeches that concept is sometimes lost and people talk about simply banning proprietary software at all costs. That may by a bit harsh, IMHO.

Re:does FOS make users dumb as well?

[Spacejock]

Makes kids dumb? My seven-year old daughter learned how to build caves & buildings in the Morrowind construction kit by trial and error, and is now adding AI characters and messing about with the scripts for them. She's well versed in many cheat codes, and uses a whole bunch of console commands to dynamically load and move objects around while in the game. (And no, I didn't show her any of this. I printed a list of console commands from a web site - something like about 7 pages of them - and left her to it. I must admit, I was curious to see how she would interpret instructions like this: The formula is (Player->SetStat, xxx) were xxx is the number you want to power up too: example: ~ to bring up console; then (Player->SetStrength, 100) then press enter. You now have 100 str. These are the stats you can set: Strength, Intelligence, [...] and about another 100+)

Now, perhaps playing mario on a GBA for days on end could stunt your intellect, but the kind of stuff she's been figuring out in Morrowind for the past few months must surely be in a different league. Put it this way, eventually her school may get around to discussing programming (right now they're at the 'this is the back button in your web browser' stage) and when they do she'll probably put 1 and 1 together and get 10.

Cheers
Simon

Re:More power to them

[rikkards]

just to spend the money the government gives (so the government give them more money the next cycle)

That isn't just Mexico. Canada and the US do it as well. On my last contract, Santa took orders around January to February to make sure that our budget was used up. The arguement was that if we didn't we would lose money next year when we may truly need it.

(Yet another) bad link

[The Cisco Kid]

The link posted appears to be to some sort of sign up page, and not a news story. I for one would greatly appreciate if /. would stop posting links to sign up pages.

If it absolutely must do so, then establish a flag that will be set for those /. entries that include such (useless) links, and allow readers to set a preference to have all such entries suppresed.

Re:US Needs to Get a CLUE!

[burndive]

Probably about as long as it took them to switch to the metric system.