Living together BUT not married: RR/MC and Linux

[Andre Garzia]

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