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: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