I was actually at this conference, and saw Stallman's talk (as well as Marc Eisenstadt's- great talk, Marc!). I also spent a great deal of time chatting with UCI students. A couple of points:
First, Stallman didn't have to "convince" anybody of anything, in spite of the OP's title. The Cuban government has been using Linux--- sorry, Richard, GNU/Linux--- in various aspects of its IT infrastructure for quite some time. That said, nearly all workstations are running some variety of Windows. For a lot of reasons (including the embargo, but as with everything in Cuba, it's more complicated than that...), most of the computers in actual use by government employees are on the older side, and as is common in the developing world large monitors are rare. Hence the 800x600 standard.
Everybody I talked to, including relatively highly-placed government officials, was quite open about the fact that essentially every single copy of Windows in Cuba is pirated. I saw an awful lot of copies of Windows Vista UE being used, which I found very interesting given how little time it's been "in the wild". All the Linux machines that I saw--- and I saw quite a few--- were running some variant of Ubuntu.
The national health IT infrastructure (Infomed, for those familiar with the topic) is built with Plone running on, I believe, Debian. All of the students I met from the UCI were big-time Linux proponents.
I don't know how accurate the UCI's claim of having 10,000 students is, but there were an awful lot of them running around, and the campus is huge. The ones I talked to were pretty adamant about that 10,000 number, but as an outsider I really can't say one way or another whether they were correct or just feeding me the party line. From what I was able to tell (by talking to a ton of different people in different roles in the system), the UCI students have some approximation of full, open internet access, but only at the university- not in their homes or dorm rooms. It's still generally illegal for Cubans to have computers in their homes, much less internet access. Certain professionals and government employees are granted the privilege, but it is very tightly regulated. The students, however, seemed to be taking full advantage of their open university access. They all had Gmail accounts, and were using Google Talk. From what I saw, their IM conversations were just as inane as any college students' IM conversations would be- mostly discussion about weekend plans and attractive members of the relevant sex.
This leads me to another general observation I made--- the gender balance in IT in Cuba is far closer to being 50/50 than it is here in the states. For all of its (many) faults, I have to give Cuba credit on this one- they've done a bang-up job of removing gender-related obstacles in the professional classes. I was there for the medical informatics subconference, which meant that I spent a lot of time talking to doctors as well as to programmers, and in both cases there were just as many women as men. At equivalent tech conferences in the States, there are usually far fewer women running around than men.
I actually just flew back tonight, and it's really late, so I'll leave it off here. If anybody wants more info about this conference, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to ramble on some more after I've gotten some sleep.:-)
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I was actually at this conference, and saw Stallman's talk (as well as Marc Eisenstadt's- great talk, Marc!). I also spent a great deal of time chatting with UCI students. A couple of points:
:-)
First, Stallman didn't have to "convince" anybody of anything, in spite of the OP's title. The Cuban government has been using Linux--- sorry, Richard, GNU/Linux--- in various aspects of its IT infrastructure for quite some time. That said, nearly all workstations are running some variety of Windows. For a lot of reasons (including the embargo, but as with everything in Cuba, it's more complicated than that...), most of the computers in actual use by government employees are on the older side, and as is common in the developing world large monitors are rare. Hence the 800x600 standard.
Everybody I talked to, including relatively highly-placed government officials, was quite open about the fact that essentially every single copy of Windows in Cuba is pirated. I saw an awful lot of copies of Windows Vista UE being used, which I found very interesting given how little time it's been "in the wild". All the Linux machines that I saw--- and I saw quite a few--- were running some variant of Ubuntu.
The national health IT infrastructure (Infomed, for those familiar with the topic) is built with Plone running on, I believe, Debian. All of the students I met from the UCI were big-time Linux proponents.
I don't know how accurate the UCI's claim of having 10,000 students is, but there were an awful lot of them running around, and the campus is huge. The ones I talked to were pretty adamant about that 10,000 number, but as an outsider I really can't say one way or another whether they were correct or just feeding me the party line. From what I was able to tell (by talking to a ton of different people in different roles in the system), the UCI students have some approximation of full, open internet access, but only at the university- not in their homes or dorm rooms. It's still generally illegal for Cubans to have computers in their homes, much less internet access. Certain professionals and government employees are granted the privilege, but it is very tightly regulated. The students, however, seemed to be taking full advantage of their open university access. They all had Gmail accounts, and were using Google Talk. From what I saw, their IM conversations were just as inane as any college students' IM conversations would be- mostly discussion about weekend plans and attractive members of the relevant sex.
This leads me to another general observation I made--- the gender balance in IT in Cuba is far closer to being 50/50 than it is here in the states. For all of its (many) faults, I have to give Cuba credit on this one- they've done a bang-up job of removing gender-related obstacles in the professional classes. I was there for the medical informatics subconference, which meant that I spent a lot of time talking to doctors as well as to programmers, and in both cases there were just as many women as men. At equivalent tech conferences in the States, there are usually far fewer women running around than men.
I actually just flew back tonight, and it's really late, so I'll leave it off here. If anybody wants more info about this conference, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to ramble on some more after I've gotten some sleep.