Hi all,
I would like to start a discussion about something I have been
thinking about on the last days regarding free software and public
universities. I study musical composition at a brazilian public
university and we have a reality where a great amount of money is spent
on proprietary software. There's a mentality among the professors and
students that we should use the best tools available, and "best" here
means the industry standard. The big problem is that it's common sense
that most of the students will be using illegal copies of these software
at home and at their work, the same people that in the near future will
become docents at their unis and will continue supporting proprietary
tools. We users of GNU software know that this money could be much
better invested in other things, like better equipment, professors etc.
So what if a country came with a project of free software where a
percentage of the money currently spent on proprietary programs for
educational and research purposes would be redirected to a national
project of free software development of all kind of applications that
the unis need? It would work like that: the art department of a Uni
needs that a specific program (let's say Gimp, Blender, an AutoCAD
alternative whatever) gets some features it's proprietary concurrent
already offers. They would fill a requirement to this national
organization which would be responsible for adressing the requests to
the related developer groups. These could be students or professors of
computer science departments of the federal universities who would be
paid to work on a specific open source project. They could fork
something that already exits or work together with the original
developers, that would depend if the changes would be welcome on the
original project or not. The consequences would be amazing, both for the
free software movement and for the education in this country. Ok, that
sounds great, but is it an utopia ? That's the point I would like to
discuss here. An approach could be to send a project to a politician (in
my case a brazilian one) who already has experience with free software
(in Brazil we already have a good number of governmental entities using
free software, for example) who could work on a law project. What I
would like to hear is if there's already something similar been doing in
other countries. Could someone post some information? This could be
tried in many countries around the globe, I really think it could work
somewhere. Probably countries in the EU would need a different approach
that south-american ones, for example , but I think we should share
opinions and ideas on this mailing list and maybe grow this discussion
to something bigger, what about a GNU-campaign?
Waiting impatiently for your answers.
Ricardo G. H.
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