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Windows in Brazil Costs 20% of Per Capita Business Income
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."
and wonder what we did to make Brazil such a backwards place to live.
I wish Slashdot would stop posting liberal politics.
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).
I'm sorry that Microsoft Windows is so much better than Linux that a country like Brazil would rather spend 20% of its GDP on Microsoft PRoducts than use open sores software.
Would the baby like free (as in speech) lollipop?
Duarte's blog post is interesting and cites some statistics, but calling it a "study" is a bit rich.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
People in Brazil don't like M$. People in tech like free software. Get over it, the non free software model is doomed because it can't compete with free in any sense of the word.
You can make this into a story of wealth distribution because knowledge is a form of wealth but it's not "liberal" or even socialist. Free software lets you help your neighbor and yourself but it's not about property.
No calls now, I'm
The original article does NOT claim that Brazil pays 20.1% of its income to Microsoft, it only states that the âoeCost of Business Licenses as % of GNI per capitaâoe is 20.1%. Only a complete moron would read that as 20.1% of Brazilâ(TM)s income going to Microsoft.
Furthermore, the OP claims that the linked article is a study; it is NOT a study, it is a blog post. It has not been fact-checked or reviewed by editors or peers, and could be a complete load of BS.
Luckily this will never become a problem for us, since we live in our parents basement and don't have jobs.
Free software is a better deal regardless of Microsoft's perception and that perception is slipping everywhere. Microsoft's loss of face in the US is well documented and has more to do with Vista annoyances and "Works for Sure" DRM betrayal than it does with price. Free software, of course, comes with no such annoyances and consistently outperforms Windows on most hardware. People might be fooled into thinking Microsoft is less evil but will still know that free software is nothing but good.
Nothing in the article states anything like what the headline of the post does. That was just plain irresponsible sensationalism.
Ever wonder how much oil money going out of the US is balanced by payments to Microsoft coming in?
1 car -> $50/week of gas -> 50*50 = 2500 a year
1 computer -> $400 os + $800 offic = 1200 every 2 years or so.
So for every car in the US need 4 people outside the US using Microsoft products to balance.
Ever wonder why the sanctions against Microsoft were not that bad?
I read the article. The author mentioned that.
Regardless of *who* sets the price, the point is if you don't have the money you can't buy the product, isn't that so? So, shh, don't tell the shills that people can use *logic* to figure out the problem here!!!!
... to pay your $699 cock-smoking fee you licensing tea-baggers.
I imagine Microsoft charges about the same and Brazilâ(TM)s brutal tax burden makes up the rest (the taxes are built into the price). So, the author acknowledges that the Brazilian government is probably the reason behind the pricing. But why let facts get in way? I mean, Microsoft is bad, so let's blame them!
It's not just Brazil. Look at any startup in the US. Flickr, Google etc etc, all used open source to get their businesses off the ground!
It has graphs and screenshots! It *is* a study!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Once again the M$ haters have to lie to prop up their arguments. It's not "Microsoft's punitive pricing", it's Brazil's outrageous taxes.
The point which the author intended is valid, i.e., that commercial software licenses are much more expensive compared to local income levels in developing countries than in the USA. It's just unfortunately that the title is a bit misleading, deflecting the discussion. As a software publisher who has distributed my software in Brazil (in Portugese) in shareware and free-trial form, I can tell you that registration levels from Brazil are equal to those of the United States or Europe. I feel that's because my software is reasonably priced there for local income levels (about 40% less in local currency than it sells for in the USA). I would also like to add, as a frequent visitor to Brazil with many friends and family members there, I don't agree that there's any anti-U.S. attitude about software.
The Brazilian gov't puts heavy taxes on any technologies that are imported. Their whole idea is to be so punative that companies that manufacture in Brazil won't have to compete vs. the outside world. The Wii costs over $1000 in Brazil and the Playstation 3 costs $1800. (These are 2007 prices, I'm not sure what's current) The games cost $300-$400 reais, which is probably about $200 US Dollars. It's not just a Microsoft issue.
Think about it, would you pay 2500 to 5000 bucks for your OS?, or would you want something in the realm of what you can pay for it, Open source is becoming an avalanche in poor countries just because its free, and its current ( up to date), 3.1416racy is rampant in poor countries because people can pay 5 to 15 bucks for the latest M$xp, and they can pay 3 bucks for a 3.1416rated game,but they can not pay the salary of a whole year for brutally expensive software according to their economy, when somebody can get an OS that does what they need, for free ( Open source/Linux), they spread the word AND the CD to all their social group, creating a geometrical distribution into their circles of buddies, I have several friends in South America, and none of them have an original disk of anything, they used the underground market to get what they needed, for the price they were able to pay. The day that M$/proprietary software matches the price of their products to the economic environment in which they want to sell ( Marking it geographically) they will get a hold of the market, in the mean time, people will want the lowest cost for the maximum benefit.
One Pew Global Attitudes survey, indicating that 51% of Brazilians surveyed have an unfavorable view of the US, hardly points to "widespread disdain" for the United States in Brazil. In fact, most Brazilians find many aspects of the US very favorable, and worthy of admiration. Unfortunately, all of that tends to be lost next to the overwhelming disapproval of American foreign policy (an attitude shared by even greater percentages of Americans). Certainly, though, there is no widespread disdain for the US IT industry, which is admired and viewed correctly as world-class.
Here in Venezuela the government has made free software a priority, where almost all ministries and public internet cafes run Ubuntu, in the company I used to work with was forced to provide Linux solutions but they themselves were closed source, even worse they wanted me to take code from a GPL and slap it as their own. Suffice to say I am not working there anymore.
That said there is hope in social comptrollers, the LUGs are checking the ministries for fake open source solutions, and reporting them.
Software licensing still eats up 20% of business income. A business in Brazil could care less if half of that was taxes so long as they have a less expensive alternative.
When you combine that with a lower per capita GDP, you get real punitive pricing. Other publishers try to take the difference in earnings power into account. Textbook publishers in India, for example, publish cheaper paperback texts with exactly the same contents for the local market and put a bigger margin onto US sales. The effect is to profit in every market by demanding almost the same amount of real effort from the purchaser. M$ has no excuse because they have almost no physical costs to recover. Their price point is just greedy and that drives people away.
So, here we have a country that is so poor buying a copy of windows amounts to 20% of a persons annual haul. Time to get out of that third-world country ?? Or use Linux ?? Yes, use Linux and that is sure to cure the problem of being third world, and leave a MASSIVE $120 (convert to whatever) for each to spend on a DLS connection to get more America software in the form of warez. Come on !! Do you really think they use Linux ?? Hello no, they pirate Windows. DUH !!
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
If their pricing were more in line with something like the Economist's Big Mac Index, they will go a long way to cutting software piracy rates in the third world.
Who knows, maybe I don't hang with the US haters, but I travel to Brazil very often and the Brazilians definitely do not have a widespread disdain for the US. They are probably one of the most friendly countries towards us in the region, outside of Colombia, of course, which is definitely our closest ally in the region.
Open source is going well in Brazil because the government is really involved in substituting proprietary software for open source. It's happening wildly in the public sector. I was astonished when my girlfriend (which is doing civil service exams) told me that in her last exam there were questions regarding OpenOffice, instead of Microsoft Office, which was the norm a few years ago.
Being a country with a past (or present) of government corruption, I really don't understand why Microsoft's bribes don't work here (but work elsewhere).
People, in certain places, are very kind with any foreigners, usually more kind than with their neighbours. But when dealing with the american values, even the founding fathers' values, brazilians hate it. Brazilians hate the old american way of life (hard working, good morals, religion, heroism of americans in wars, etc).
On Windows and OSS: almost none common user pay for Windows. Almost every home user use pirate Windows. Linux is only for computer professionals or government law (coercion).
On brazilian taxes: yes, 60% on every imported product, except books or cultural material (music, movie), but they still tax the media. I bought a Dell laptop yesterday that in US would cost $1100. In Brazil, it was nearly the triple.
And last, I suggest you this text on brazilian anti-americanism: http://www.aim.org/guest-column/anti-americanism-in-brazil-and-latin-america/
The FSFLA, the South American sister organization of the FSF, is trying to get the license altered, but comments like those of Omar Kaminski, one of the drafters of the license, that the "GPL is incompatible with Brazilian legislation," and that "perhaps free software in Brazil is moving in a different direction than in the USA" do little to reduce the concerns of FOSS advocates.
That is an interesting issue - we assume the GPL is enforceable but much of that seems to be based on US copyright laws and various international agreements. It would be interesting to see if the GPL really would hold up in the face of conflicting national laws.
A country could pass legislation allowing companies to keep self-developed code proprietary even if it uses GPL code in a product. Protecting one's local companies and developing industries would be a higher priority than keeping the spirit of FOSS.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is simply not true. It is just a myth spread by open source advocates. Go check out who actually Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox in those countries by yourself.
In the eyes of non-geeks, the real benefits of open source is just the price and nothing else. When one can get a DVD with Windows and MS Office for $0 (download) to $1 (buy one at the street corner,) nobody will have the incentive to use Linux and Firefox. Period.
If yogu have
Not being the center of attention for exploitation, and yet being a big countries, the use of online services for government/public and bank/public relations is the norm in Brazil. All banks in Brazil has offered complete and free online banking for at least 8 years, banks changed from having dozens of tellers, and enormous lines to having few tellers and dozens of ATM like machines that offer online banking. All banks offer business software for automatically paying bills, and software for printing bills receivable in any bank, and automatic payment for utilities for clients. Government agencies offer the usual run down on laws, and a variety of the most used services like filling tax return, check status of tax returns, CPF(SSN), CNPJ(number ID for busnisses), filling of inventory for controlled substances(pharmacies), and a variety of other niche services. Actually one would be very indifferent to the future by asking foreign companies to devise solutions for nation-wide needs, not to mention how vulnerable it makes the system to cast one's luck with everyone else. I think nothing that raises open source awareness and increases the number of open source technicians can be viewed in a bad lighting. Indeed open source could be doing better in Brazil, but with a population that doesn't have clue what a Microsoft Tax is, unless you buy a laptop, it can't be viewed as a surprise.
I live in a nice 3,000,000 people city; we have theaters, movies, moderately high-speed Net access (2Mbps from my home), cable/sat TV, universities, ...
Care to elaborate?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Hyperbole, thy name is Slashdot!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well, this sure ain't the market for Macs, and that is why I doubt that that Mac will be the dominant platform in 5-10 years. BRIC's GDP (Brazil, Russia, India and China in case you were wondering) is simply not high enough for there to be a market for Macs.
Microsoft on the other hand seems to have understood this and price their products accordingly. This strategy keeps people locked in, but it hardly creates any revenue. Not that Microsoft doesn't have enough money as it is, but I think it is unlikely that there will be a profitable market in the next five years to come. BillyG will continue to travel the world, spreading the glorious word of Micro$oft and the politicians fall for it.
Free and Open Source Software has a golden opportunity here, but it requires more than just being out there. What I believe is needed is a local movement with political backing. The software is there, but now we need to make sure that it is adopted.
Widespread use in Brazil, will surely affect the rest of South America and as the summary says: "which also tends to favor software that is not perceived as American." can't apply to only Brazil. The year of Linux has yet to come, but if it happens, then it wont happen because Americans decide that Microsoft is evil.
GDP of Brazil: $1.269 trillion
Microsoft global yearly revenue: $57.95 billion
The current Da Silva's government is supposed to do its work as promised (back when he and its folks were the opposition to the then current gov't) and do concrete pro-FOSS actions.
Everyone who works at the gov't knows that there's absolutely no incentive to use FOSS (except by its own benefits). -- Really, zero. All until now has been rethoric.
Things the gov't could do:
- Tag (let's say) 80% of money the IT expenses (hw & sw) for exclusive use by FOSS-based solutions.
- The money spent in proprietary software-based solutions should be fully justified (why FOSS wasn't suitable instead etc). That, naturally, checked afterwards in an audit.
Those two, alone, would do wonders.
n/t
I wish people would realize that FUD like this doesn't help the cause of Free software. It is much better in the long run to inform people of the truth and let them act based on that rather than using FUD to give yourself--and others--a false impression of superiority.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
For a concrete example of abuse by statistics, consider that in the US, MS-Windows licence costs exceed the total annual income of at least 50% of all computer users [kids!]
Please do not mistake me for an MS-toad. Personally, any MS licence cost above large negative numbers is overcharging. I have to be _paid_ to use MS products.
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.
It already happened in the 1980s. Brazilian protectionism required imports to justify that a Brazilian alternative was not available. Because of this, there was a local production of MSX computers and a local reimplementation of Unix (SOX). By the 1990s, they had figured that protectionism was harming local consumers of equipment more than promoting local production and that there were too many routine authorizations for imports.
It seems that free trade was not accepted enough.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
My favorite part:
One person states almost all copies of Mandriva shipped were imediately overwritten with Windows...because the end users want their PCs to have capabilities similar to the ads and shows they see on TV.
That's a pretty good analysis of the FOSS vs. Windows issue.
Until some kind of agnostic application set exists, that is independent of OS, FOSS is in trouble.
That agnostic application set might be a persistent google download, a better Open Office, a better Firefox, but until the applications on the TV, in classes, and at work are as identical as a minor upgrade FOSS adoption will have serious problems with the "masses".
The European Union Public License, which is similar to GPLv2 to my untrained eye, is available in lots of languages, including "Portuguese Portuguese" :-)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I completely agree with you and I would like to increase your comment mark but I have no idea how to do it :(
Sorry
Ok, you can lie with statistics, but still the microsoft prices are too big for the average consumer, let me show with hard numbers:
Price of Windows Vista Home Basic: R$499,00
Minimum wage: R$415,00
And believe me, a lot of families earn the minimum here. That's 83% the cost of the OS. Do you see any chance of them paying that?
Of course, you could argue that these people don't own computers. Not true, since there are programs of distribution of low-cost PCs (how they would be able to run Vista is a mistery), and some do have them.
But that's not the main market. Let's say them a good middle-class salary, of about R$1200,00
Now the OS is 43% of the wage. Would you pay it?
Darn, myself used a pirated edition during my whole childhood, until I learned enough so I could install Linux.
entropy happens
> I-wish- the government in the US cared enough about the GPL to have a licensing
> controversy
I don't. I prefer that the government take no interest in the GPL at all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Thanks for the very informative post, as I live in the "Western world", my news has little or nothing about 90% of the worlds people. (And a shocking amount about the tiny fraction of clueless fools known as celebreties)
I had no idea of the positive moves made by your government. Most of our governments are also hopelessly corrupt, but we have the label "lobbying" for this corruption.
This is the best OSS news I have heard in months. the worlds fifth largest population, using free software, I don't know the percentage of computer users in Brazil, but even at 2 %, that means more than 3 million people freed from the FUD, and with possibly 1% of them contributing to the OSS ecology, that gives us another 30,000 bugfixers, tweakers and forkers.
I also think this is exactly what any country that respects it independence needs to do, as being chained to Microsoft, as the U.S.further regresses into a fascist theocracy, strikes me a very,very poor foreign policy.
Again, thanks for the news from outside, makes me think that OSS just climbed another 0.1 on the Ghandi scale
This is NOT a signature.
What is really missing? My experience is that commercial software lags the free softare world with the most restrictive being at the bottom of the pack. There are very few applications where a free alternative is not available and none of them are general purpose desktop things most businesses and home users are intersted in.
Why do you care so much about we are using linux or windows?
I live and work (a lot) in Brazil. I'm on the IT field, and most of the people I know uses linux, my company uses Linux/Intel in most of its datacenter.
Comme on! Don't blame about stuff you don't know!
Our voting machines (which are xxx times better than the diebolds) mostly run a port of linux.
There is a huge movement to migrate all government software to open source.
And people don't hate the US, we maybe disagree with a lot of the things the US Government does. But after all, hate is not a common word in Brazil. Of course you have those narrow minded that think the US are the devil, but these are a very small portion of the population.
We have a lot of taxes here, we suffer to buy a decent computer, paying absurd customs fees.
But in case of software? I think it should be much higher!!! If we have a option on open source, why pay at all?
It might well be that MS pricing is too high. It's rather high in the US, where MS-Windows may cost 33% of the machine purchase price (for low-end machines). Whence people calling it the MS tax.
Furthermore, US law seems to accept grey market good and rules anti-grey measures as anti-competitive (illegal) behaviour. So MS cannot segment markets as much as they might like.
But I simply remember Napoleon: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the middle of making a mistake."
Had to read the summary twice. 20% of per capita business income. That would be not all income. Just the business income. To explain why that matters, let's take a hypothetical situation. All business income (assuming that income means profits) could be $1. They didn't say revenue... they said income. So if all businesses spend all the money they make on reinvestment in developing new business, salaries, etc, then they have very little profit left at the end. Now take that figure and divide by the population. You get per capita business income. 20% of that is still a very, very small part of the economy. But the headline makes it sound like 20% of all the money spend in Brazil goes to MS. At the very least the title is ambiguous. It should have specified whether it was business revenue or business profits (rather than "income") that it was talking about.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here is an example on the other side of the Atlantic http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2365
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I have spent some time living in Brazil.
1) there is no disdain for American things there (unfortunately). American franchises and products are widespread there, if not quite with the same stranglehold one sees in Mexico City, Australia, etc. American "culture" - TV and Hollywood - is swallowed up there quite readily, to great destructive effect as always.
2) Windows is absolutely endemic in Brazil (and Russia and India, btw). The appalling statistics in the headline tell the story, I am not sure why the summary takes such a contradictory tack. Open source is destined to grow in the BRIC bloc, anybody could have predicted that for many common sense reasons, but MS has a lock on mindshare which is both tragic and incredibly costly.
And to the (presumably American) posters who claim Brazil is "backward" - they need to look a bit closer at their own neighbourhood. Brazil's infrastructure is excellent, they are (like all BRIC) highly educated, and have a culture of hard work and accountability - not to mention friendliness and generosity - which makes Bushistan look quite backward and socially diseased. Travel and take an interest in other cultures - get over your superiority complex.
you had me at #!
The only way a software license has any meaning at all is through the government and courts system.