On Nov 21, 2005, at 2:13 PM, David Bovill wrote:
Basically they insist on open source solutions for Government
contracts - also very big supporters of open content (Creative
Commons) with Gliberto Gil (Minister of Culture and renowned
musician) being largely responsible for getting Creative Commons to
add the sampling license to their suite of licenses.
I must confess I do not know the details in Brasil - anyone? But
here in Europe out of the last 4 government contracts for projects
two virtually insisted on open source and the other two looked on
them favourably. The forthcoming EU IST5 call I am helping with is
no exception.
Heh,
I think I must step in since I am the only Brazilian in the list.
Brazil is moving towards linux, there are many popular distros made
by Brazilian companies and lots (and I mean lots) of Open Source
Zealots involved with all kinds of branches of the goverment. To
understand this move one should understand two things, first is
called Tropicalia which was a cultural movement akin to hippie
culture that moved much of Brazil during the dictatorship era.
Tropicalia was rebellion using music, poetry and whichever cultural
means they could found, it was getting foreign culture (Ie Rock
Music) and modifing it so it became Brazilian (Thats why it's called
Tropicalia and Antropofagia Cultural). It was not like some other
nations that were trying to ban foreign culture, it was like embrace
and extend, I think the phrase was: "let us use what is good by
tropicalize the thing.". Gilberto Gil was there and so were others.
Other point to understand is that Brazil is deep linked with some
kind of Robin Hood Philosophy where we're under some evil rule by
foreign powers and must steal and give things to the poor. It's more
metaphorical than reality. So how this translate to software?
Zealots in Brazil see Microsoft as evil power that creates
proprietary software that costs tons of money to the goverment.
Solution migrate everything to free software and defy those evil
powers. The whole goverment moved on that direction, and when
Brazilian goverment act with tropicalia and robin hood behaviour in
mind, they will not be stopped. Now that you have the background. Let
us talk about two consequences here.
Our singing and dancing minister said: "free software is the way!". I
study at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (AKA UFF) at the
school known as IACS (Social Comunications and Arts Institute), in
our campus are the journalism, advertising and film schools. When
goverment decided to run on linux the first thing that happened was a
task force entered the campus, formatted all machines, installed Red
Hat. Consequence, work stopped, many classes stopped. No one could
use Linux, the office suite format would not cross platforms, trying
to start a document at university for late editing at home with
windows was a sure way to loose everything. Unicode didn't work.
Keyboard mapping didn't work, clipboard didn't work... we're still
trying to solve this issues. The journalism school stopped all
classes for Desktop Publishing since there's no suite for those tasks
in linux, the advertising school is forcing GIMP down the throat of
the students when all they want is Corel Draw back. When all this
happened, one of the film school teachers came to me and whispered:
"Andre, thank God tonight because we use Macs and they will never try
to install linux on our machines.". Yes on the film school we're
stuck with MacOS 9 and final cut pro 2 but it's better than Red Hat
for me. That's what happens when goverment decides to migrate itself
to linux without thinking that in the Real world, people might need
proprietary platforms, the zealots excuse is: "if we all move, we'll
create momentum to F/OSS so that better apps will be created." my
answer is always the same: "Adobe has a team of highly skilled
engineers, and by that I mean real graduation not late night hacking,
and it took them years to create PageMaker and InDesign, do you
really think that half a dozen spare time coders that usually can't
coordinate among themselves will be able to deliver a similar
solution in less than a couple years?". Usually after this question,
they start barking at me for being a "capitalist bastard"
Now, why linux is important for me and why I wanted RunRev to support
it? There's another goverment project called PC Conectado, which is
aimed in building cheap computers running linux for the masses. There
will be two kinds of computers, the really cheap ones that will run
linux, and the more expensive ones that might run windows, Zeta,
whatever. I am talking about millions of computers, not thousands,
millions. One contract with this goverment for bundling your software
in the machine and boom, millions of users... That project is a good
idea, the bad part is that some spoiled brats in the goverment are
ruining it.
Well enough about Brasil.
Cheers
andre
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