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General discussion

Part Of The 3rd PC Revolution???

Nov 18, 2003 1:08PM PST

"BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) - If he is to make good on his promise to improve life for the tens of millions of Brazilians who live in dire poverty, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva knows that one key challenge is to bridge a massive technology gap. And if that means shunning Microsoft Corp. software in South America's largest country, then so be it.

Silva's top technology officer wants to transform the land of samba and Carnival into a tech-savvy nation where everyone from schoolchildren to government bureaucrats uses open-source software instead of costly Windows products.

Such a policy makes eminent sense for a developing country where a mere 10 percent of the 170 million people have computers at home and where the debt- laden government is the nation's biggest computer buyer, says Sergio Amadeu, the open-source enthusiast appointed to head Brazil's National Information Technology Institute by Silva after the president took office this year.

Paying software licensing fees to companies like Microsoft is simply "unsustainable economically" when applications that run on the open-source Linux operating system are much cheaper, Amadeu said. Under his guidance, Silva's administration is encouraging all sectors of government to move toward open-source programs, whose basic code is public and freely available.
"

Brazil Leans Away From Microsoft

Discussion is locked

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nt) Good on them.
Nov 19, 2003 4:51PM PST

.

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Not particularly new
Nov 19, 2003 10:02PM PST

I may be incorrect, but back in the days of OS2 Warp and Windows 95, didn't several European business groups tell Microsoft to shove it and went with OS2 when they couldn't negotiate with Microsoft regarding some of the software (think it was the old IE debate again) being required bundle on new computers with the Windows 95 system? Or was it European governments?

Thought I remembered something like that.

The system administrator types here would know much better than me, but isn't it only recently (comparitively anyway) that Windows NT and its successors Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro made much inroads at all into large network servers? Large servers have often been some flavor of Unix I believe?

Alternatives are a good thing. And particularly for an organization or government that is tight on cash, free or almost free is much better pricing.

For such an organization that has little already invested in MS systems, such a choice may well be the best. For one that already has a huge investment in software and all it's staff is only trained in MS, well the cost of changeover to "free software" can be pretty steep.

Alternatives are good, even if you don't believe MS to be an evil empire.

roger

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Will they have that option?
Nov 20, 2003 1:44AM PST

Linux, Unix (i.e. FREEBSD), and the GPL are under heavy attack from the SCO Group right now. They are attempting to intimidate people with the aim of extracting license fees for Linux. It doesn't seem to bother them that they did not write or develop Linux. If their attack succeeds, there may not be an alternative to Windows.

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I would expect that
Nov 20, 2003 8:44AM PST

every line of challenged code will be rewritten from scratch by Linux developers. The problem at the moment is determining what is "stolen" code, as SCO is keeping much of its "evidence" under wraps.

Ian