Open source: Developing markets and anti-Americanism
Published: 14 Nov 2005 12:00 GMT
Brazil: The spirit of community
Spotlight project:
The Brazilian government may distribute one million laptops running
open source software to local schools. In January, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology launched a project
to build low-cost Linux-based laptops for the developing world. The
Brazilian government is considering building 2 million of these
laptops, half of which will be distributed to local schools, and is investigating the finances of the scheme.
Summary
Open source software has been deployed by the federal, state and city
governments in Brazil, although the states and cities have been more
progressive, according to Ronaldo Lemos, the director of the Centre for
Technology & Society at the Fundação Getulio Vargas law school in
Brazil, which recently advised Brazilian government on the its open
source strategy.
"Before the Federal government embraced free software, there had been initiatives at the city and state levels that helped to pave the way for a broader program," says Lemos.
There have been a number of large scale migrations in Brazilian states, for example, the state of Parana is migrating 10,000 government employees from proprietary software to a customised version of the open source collaboration application eGroupWare and São Paulo has deployed Linux on 16,000 PCs and 1,000 servers in schools across the state, according to Mandriva. Some federal government agencies have also migrated to open source software, with seven of the 22 federal ministries reportedly using open source. This includes a number of open source desktop deployments, for example, OpenOffice.org is run on 4000 seats in the federal government, according to Erwin Tenhumberg, a product marketing manager at Sun.
The Brazilian federal government has drafted a bill that would mandate the use of open source software by public departments. This decree would force...
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6 comments
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Funny, I always thought Brazil was located in the... Anonymous -
anti-Americanism ???
Most of the major Linux dist... cyber_rigger
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DO NOT click the Times of India link! It threw a... Anonymous
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The link to the Times of India has been remov... Alex -
You can ask every serious IT security expert to le... Matthias Lutzer
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F/OSS is pro-American. Where do you get this anti... Olav Petri
