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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?
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).
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.
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.
Agreed. I somehow miss all the original articles in these so-called dupes, and find many of them interesting. I agree that it is somewhat unprofessional of a website to have very common duplicates. Oh well, I'm not paying for it, so I can't complain!
And to some of you:
If something is free, DON'T CONSTANTLY COMPLAIN ABOUT IT. If it's unbearable, don't use it. In this case, duplicates are easy to handle: read the next article, or go to another webpage. Duh.
Not everybody is on Slashdot 24/7.
Although I read slashdot on a daily basis, this is the first time that I see this, and I'm glad it has been brought to my attention.
Ah.. Brazil... it just moved up on the list of countries that I want to move to.
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.
That is not entirely correct. Brazil does have very strong software companies that build business apps; invoicing, accounts receivable/payable, supply management, tax automation and the whole nine yards. Only that software tend to be targeted at Brazilian companies mostly (Portuguese language, sometimes Spanish as an option) and to small to mid-sized businesses.
We don't have anyone writing operating systems (out of academia, that is) and office applications, so it's natural that FOSS look appealing in those areas.
Other than that, IT is very strong in services, support and custom apps, here, and in that realm FOSS is again a very good fit, as it allows one company to fully customize a package to suit special needs, while not being encumbered by proprietary licenses.
I know he can tell you why Brazil is so great for FOSS Projects and developers
-- When did Ignorance Become a Point of View?
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 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.
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.