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Windows in Brazil Costs 20% of Per Capita Business Income

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hate-when-that-happens dept.

mjasay writes "Ever wonder why open source is so popular in Brazil and other BRIC nations? As one study suggests, one big reason may well be Microsoft's punitive pricing, which exceeds 20 percent of Gross National Income for businesses in Brazil (and 7.8 percent of consumer GNI). This leads to a second, related reason: At those prices, there's little hope that Brazil can build a home-grown software economy on the foundation of proprietary software. This factor is exacerbated by Brazil's widespread disdain for the United States, which also tends to favor software that is not perceived as American. Of late the free and open-source Brazilian dream may be fading a little but its importance to the long-term growth prospects of the Brazilian economy shouldn't be understated."

8 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. 20%? What are the customs duties? by Tsu+Dho+Nimh · · Score: 5, Informative

    Duties on imports may have something to do with the 20%. Right as Intel started putting manuals online, I was working on that project, and Brazil was high on the list of downloaders. We tracked them to a technical university, did some emailing, and found that the duty on a printed manual nearly tripled the cost of the manual (in USD).

    1. Re:20%? What are the customs duties? by Flavio · · Score: 4, Informative

      That's weird, I'm brazilian and last time I checked, books (and possible other printed materials) weren't taxed when imported. It's why I tend to buy books at amazon.com.
      If you ever imported _anything_ in last 10 years (which i doubt) you surely knew this is not the reality.

      Eerything you import, even those things that are explicitly not taxed, gets abusive taxing. Brazillian Customs sets tax according to their mood, and if you ask for a tax analyse, consider your tax doubled.

      In brazil, the product price plus shipping (yes they tax shipping too) gets taxed 60% (import tax) plus 20% (ICMS, another tax).
      Bullshit. I import goods at least once a month, and this is not the case. Printed material, such as books and magazines are NOT charged an import tax. Software is also exempt from import taxes.

      The tax for imports over the mail are very clear: 60% over the value of the goods and shipping. The 20% ICMS charge only counts if you're importing with a courier such as FedEx or UPS. Regular mail does not get charged the 20%.

      If the package does not accompany an invoice, or if the invoice's value is obviously fraudulent, then the customs official has can attribute a value which he believes is fitting. If you disagree with this value, you can challenge his value, but this will entail a lot of effort and you will most likely lose. You may also not import used goods, or prohibited items (such as firearms, explosives, live animals and organs).

      Customs officials are corrupt bastards if you have to deal them in person (for instance, if not importing through the mail), but I've never had them charge me anything other than 60% over mail order items. In particular, I've imported at least US$ 5000 in books over the last 10 years, and I've never been charged an import tax.
    2. Re:20%? What are the customs duties? by morcego · · Score: 3, Informative

      I find it hard to blame the government on this one.
      The manuals are printed in Brazil. So are the CDs/DVDs.
      Having access to the price list of a Microsoft distributor (not resaler), I can see some very big price differences, as I'm pretty sure happen everywhere else. The OEM license (which include media and manual, btw) costs about half the shelf price. And I'm not talking bulk here. I'm talking a guy with a computer store buying a single OEM license for a computer he is selling. Educational licenses are even lower (and no, there are no tax differences there).

      Taxes on software in Brazil are far from high, if you compare it to other taxes. Actually, they are lower than taxes on books.

      Even if the government completely removed the taxes from software, Microsoft prices would still be too high for a developing country like Brazil.

      --
      morcego
    3. Re:20%? What are the customs duties? by glgraca · · Score: 2, Informative

      This is simply false. The brazilian constitution exempts books, magazines, newspapers, and the paper they are printed on from all taxes. It's in article 150 (VI - d). If you buy books from abroad, you don't pay a centavo of import duties. This I can also attest to from personal experience.

    4. Re:20%? What are the customs duties? by Flavio · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've never been charged an import tax ON BOOKS.

      I pay the 60% tax on other things all the time.

  2. Not quite the price by iris-n · · Score: 5, Informative

    I live in Brazil. The anti-american wave has largely passed away: you don't find love for US here, but neither hate.

    As for the pricing scheme, it is really outrageous for the average income here, but I don't think that it has much to do with the linux adoption here. It's very rare to see someone that does care about copyright here. Even if Microsoft sold at reasonable prices (yes, it is the government's fault), just the fact we need to register, call for license keys and all that bullshit makes us just pirate the damn thing. And if it's hard to pirate (wga and all), we go away. And there's linux. It's free and it doesn't hassle us. Oh, it's open source and all? Cute. But that's not the main point.

    Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people that care a lot about FOSS philosophy (myself included) but for the masses, the "software that don't get in my way" is more important.

    --
    entropy happens
  3. Re:Time for us westerners to wring our hands... by gregorio · · Score: 4, Informative

    Backwards place to live? You get that from experience?
    I don't know about him, but I do get that same impression, and from experience. A lot of it. Brazil IS a backwards place to live. While people from the US do complain about taxes and how their money is used by the government, things in Brazil are not simply "worse" on that point. They're completely different, as the people who pay taxes in Brazil are not the ones using governmental services at all. EVERY SINGLE NEED of the brazillian middle class (the ones who pay for that big joke named Brazil) is provided by very expensive private services.

    And the impoverished are not just "poor", as in "lacking money for basic elements of life". They're also extremely indolent and dishonest. They lack basic culture and effort to achieve any kind of progress.

    They have access to an infrastructure that would be considered an impossible dream decades ago. The things is: a lot of jewish and italian people arrived at this very same land of crap, decades ago, without any money at all and none of the thousands of schools and no universal and free healthcare at all. Yet they managed to educate themselves and provide good education for their children (who are now 40-50 years old), without a single cent in their pocket. Their sons and daughters (who were impoverished children) are now members of the upper-middle class.

    I'd live in any brazilian coastal city over any US coastal city. Warm climate, nice girls, drinking caipirinhas all the time, hapy music, happy people.
    You forgot to mention "random drug-motivated murders". And also forgot to mention that all those "happy people" are actually impoverished idiots who would rather spend their entire day partying around the city than working hard to improve their lives. Remember the Ant and the Grasshopper? If not, it's a classic that explains a lot about those bozos you call "happy people".

    And if booze is something that motivates you to some kind of decision about where to live, you need treatment, not a better city.
  4. Brazil free software dream is anything but fading. by nxsryan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sorry, but this repetition about the "Brazil FOSS utopia fading" that I hear everyone talking about is largely, I believe, due to the Linux.com article that is linked to above which highlights a bunch of negative comments by a few individuals and talks about some of the licensing controversies that have come up as Brazilian society as a whole widely adopts free software (I -wish- the government in the US cared enough about the GPL to have a licensing controversy).

    In fact, the Brazil free software movement is an incredible phenomenon.

    Consider:
    1) Brazil's recent announcement at FISL of 52,000 computers labs (each with 15 terminals) serving over 50 million students -- with 29k of them coming online within the year -- all running Linux Educacional and KDE. Meanwhile, in -my- Ohio hometown, the public school system is fiscally doomed while still paying out enormous sums to Microsoft, IBM, Apple.

    2) My wife, who is Brazilian, worked in the Brazilian equivalent of the US's White House, the Palacio do Planalto, migrating even the President's -Secretary- to an open source desktop running OpenOffice, not to mention the rest of the federal agencies in Brasilia. How is the open source migration of federal agencies going in Washington DC? Oh, right...

    3) Brazil should be a model for much richer countries in this hemisphere, like the US and Canada, with their enormous and expansive Digital Inclusion program, which is entirely based on open source & free software. This program provides free training and computer lab access to bridge the digital divide in Brazil, with labs in urban favelas (ghettos that encircle the major metropolitan cities) and even remote indigenous communities living in the Amazon -- some of the Digital Inclusion projects are only accessible by BOAT. And in those areas, open source computer labs are, in many cases, the only computer access, the VOIP they provide are the only telephone, and so on.

    4) A recent study confirmed that over 70% of Brazilian companies with more than 1,000 employees are using open source software.

    5) Brazil has migrated the largest state-owned IT firm in Latin America (SERPRO) to open source software (including many more companies that are migrating).

    6) FISL, hosted in Porto Alegre, has got to be one of the largest free software conferences in the world, if not the Americas. This year, Lula made news by saying that he would do everything he could to attend FISL. When was the last time George Bush or Bill Clinton said anything about free software, let alone went out of their way to support it in person?

    It's really amazing to me how many open source advocates in the United States are indifferent to the open source phenomenon happening not only in Brazil, but throughout all of Latin America. One Linux.com article dismisses it as "hype" and that's enough for the most popular English-language open source news site? Meanwhile, an enormous free software movement goes literally un-noticed (when, in fact, there is plenty of room for voluntarism by wealthy North American developers in the region).

    Personally, I make my living as owner of a business which works with open source/free software in Latin America and the United States. My wife was employed for several years by the Brazilian government working exclusively on the widespread deployment of open source technology in Brazil. And, I operate a news website which provides English-language updates about the free software movement in Latin America - http://news.northxsouth.com/

    I urge everybody to take a look at our site and re-evaluate if Brazil or any Latin American country is a fading open source dream, or if, in fact, they are doing the hard work of converting their government to free software and, moreover, converting their society to open source software. We should take a look at what they're doing and ask ourselves: "why are -we- failing so miserably to influence -our- government?" instead of trying to find any gap in their impressive demonstration of the power of open source to transform massive social institutions.