Slashdot Mirror
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.
Google news (includes reg-free nytimes link).
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.
... let's have a discussion on how hot round booties in Brazilian thongs are. Better than porn I argue! Seriously, if you mod this down as offtopic or whatever, you are seriously messed up. These amazing butts warrant a good discussion. What do my fellow slashdotters think of these things? I can hardly wait for summer! Shawing!!!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
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)
I hope nothing under the GPL is being used, as Brazil has a pretty sketchy record of recognising intellectual property rights.
The article you link to is about breaking patents and manufacturing their own AIDS medication. Before someone jumps up and down screaming "so it's OK if it's medicine?", read the linked article to realize that this is A-OK according to a UN rule stating that nations can break the patent and produce their own medications in the case of an emergency. From the numbers I've read, it wouldn't be un-reasonable to say Brazil does have an emergency.
Brazil has demonstrated that they have tried to play fair, and have paid for the medications from multinationals until now, despite being vocally against the said multinational corporation's tactics. They also make clear that they are "breaking" the patent, not outright ignoring it, in accordance to UN rules.
I think we can jump up and down and throw a fit after some other more serious, blatant and un-ethical IP violations are put under the light. So far I don't think there's anything wrong with the Brazilian gov't using OSS. Or home-brewed HIV/AIDS medication.
Maybe there just isn't any "News for Nerds" out there this week, hence the dupes. I mean, the technology world is so slow moving news is hard to come by. Hang on a minute, Technocrat has a load of interesting stories.
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.
Dupe, Dupe, Dupe, (Dupe of URL!)
Dupe, Dupe, (Dupe of URL!)
Dupe, Dupe, (Dupe of URL!)
Everybody Together!
Dude, you make it sound like it's ok to violate essentially arbitraty "intellectual property" laws just to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor people.
Have you no sense of ethics?
KFG
The US administration and/or Microsoft will make sure that his political opponents get plenty of advice and money.
I know he can tell you why Brazil is so great for FOSS Projects and developers
-- When did Ignorance Become a Point of View?
Hot hot brazillian pron stars use Linux!
Netcraft
(NSFW) Mike in Brazil (NSFW)
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
I am no means a Microsoft support and I do like Linux and I try to support it when possible. But having a policy of all OSS Software is just as bad as having a policy of Every program needs to be Commercial. While Linux and other OSS application are getting better every year there are some things are just not as good as Commercial Applications, a lot of people would agree the GIMP is not quite up to Photoshop standards, or Linux Printing Services are by no means as easy to setup then Windows (Especially for smaller networks), OpenOffice and all the other OSS Office Clones still don't have a working grammar checker. I haven't yet found an OSS RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool for Linux that is as easy to use a Visual Fox Pro, or even VB. I support the method when they are looking for software to fit there needs they examine the most affordable first and see if it does what they want then go to a higher price. If they nothing does what they really want then go back down to the OSS version.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Slashdot is just implementing RAID 1
(NB: RAID = Repeat Article In about a Day)
AT&ROFLMAO
I heard on NPR yesterday morning that they are also the biggest software thief in the world today.
Nobody who's done business in China would believe that.
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).
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.
/. entries that include such (useless) links, and allow readers to set a preference to have all such entries suppresed.
If it absolutely must do so, then establish a flag that will be set for those
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)
It's not the biggest one (it's hard for everyone who lives here to believe that, since it's so easy to buy pirated software), but recent researches have shown that Asia leads on all pirate penetration stats.