Stallman Convinces Cuba to Switch to Open Source

prostoalex writes "It's a big victory for Richard Stallman in North America, as Cuba decided to adopt open source software on the national level. Both Cuba and Venezuela are currently working on switching the entire government infrastructure to GNU/Linux operating system and applications, the Associated Press reports from Havana: 'Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.' The AP article doesn't mention the distro used for government workers, but says that the students are working on a Gentoo-based distro."

Comments

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[vadim_t]

Well, this is what we've been arguing about all along, isn't it? That Linux is cheaper than licensing and maintaining MS software?

So, why exactly should Cuba NOT use it, instead of wasting the precious little money it has on making MS richer? Are you proposing a course of action where OSS is only good for "friendly" rich countries, and kept away from places like Cuba that could hugely benefit from it, just to avoid silly associations with communism that should have got old a long time ago?

This seems to me again the same faulty logic that says that X is evil because thought X was good.

If we get another "spokesman" I sure hope it's not of the sort you seem to want.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[bill_mcgonigle]

They will probably spin it as "Hey Cuba uses Linux and Free Software. Do you want to be a Communist too?"

The article says they want to ween themselves off of Microsoft Windows. They don't use Linux, yet, they're a Windows shop.