Brazil moving towards open source

Correspondents

November 25 2003

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

Such a policy makes eminent sense for a developing country where a mere 10 per cent of the 170 million people have computers at home, and where the debt-laden government is the biggest computer buyer, says Sergio Amadeu, who heads Brazil's National Information Technology Institute.

Amadeu, an open-source enthusiast, was appointed by da Silva this year.

Paying software licensing fees to companies such as Microsoft is simply "unsustainable economically" when applications that run on the open-source Linux operating system are much cheaper, Amadeu says.

Da Silva's administration is encouraging all sectors of government to move toward open-source programs, whose basic code is public and freely available.

"We have some islands in the federal government using open source, but we want to create a continent," says Amadeu, a former economics professor.

He gained fame before joining da Silva's team by launching a network of free computer centres in Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo.

Amadeu, who uses a Linux laptop in his office in an annex of da Silva's presidential palace, wrote the book, Digital Exclusion: Misery in the Information Era, which argues that the gap between the needy and the wealthy will deepen unless the poor have easy access to technology that the rich have at their fingertips, especially in developing countries.

Only two small government agencies in Brasilia — Amadeu's department and the government-run news agency — have so far shifted from Microsoft operating systems to open-source.

Brazil recently signed an agreement with IBM to help boost government use of platforms such as Linux.

Amadeu says he's talking to election officials about using open-source software in the country's more than 400,000 electronic voting machines, about 20 per cent of which run Windows.

Amadeu insists the government has no plans to mandate open-source software use, but Microsoft is lobbying to prevent the policy becoming law. "We still think free choice is best for companies, the individuals and the government," Microsoft Brazil marketing director Luiz Moncau says.

"There is a risk of creating a technology island in Brazil supported by law."

Any move away from Windows by Brazil's government would hurt Microsoft in its biggest South American market.

The company got 6-10 per cent of its $US318 million ($441.6 million) in Brazilian revenues from the government for the fiscal year to June, Moncau says.

Source and Copyright: The Australian