Mais um artigo sobre a liderança brasileira no Open Source e o nacionalismo anacronico

O cio.com.au publicou um longo artigo mostrando como o o governo brasileiro está desafiando o monopólio da Microsoft.

O texto fala do trabalho do Sérgio Amadeu, do processo que a M$ tentou mover contra ele, da nossa reação q obrigou a turma do chairman Bill a desisitir da ação judicial com o rabo entre as pernas e da expansão do projeto dos telecentros.

News of the impending suit sparked a hostile reaction among Brazilians, who decried what they saw as bullying tactics of a US multinational intent on restricting open debate. Microsoft received petitions from the international open source community, criticism from senior politicians and outright condemnation in the opening address of the country's annual IT forum by the Ministry of Science and Technology's policy secretary, Arthur Pereira Nunes, which drew a sustained ovation.

Microsoft Brazil quietly dropped the action. Since then the open source movement in Brazil has grown apace with regular encouragement from Amadeu. In March this year ITI announced Casa Brasil, an extension of the original Telecentro experiment. The $R204 million national plan will install 90 telecentres in the poorest, most heavily populated and under-employed urban and rural suburbs as part of its digital inclusion strategy. Each centre will have 10 PCs running free software, a reading room and auditorium for 50 people.

O artigo fala tb da ligação do Open Source com o sentimento anti-americano...

The lessons of recent history mean open source attitudes in South America are coloured by anti-US sentiment. Citizens of Ecuador, Guatemala, Chile, Colombia and Argentina have had fatal encounters with US foreign policy, and US multinationals are often viewed with as much suspicion as the White House itself.

Brazil is no exception. More than 40 years ago a US-backed coup overthrew the elected leftist government and helped install a military dictatorship. Da Silva's Workers' Party, elected in 2003, is the first leftist party to win power since that coup. Therefore it is hardly surprising that ardent nationalism and anti-US tension have left an imprint on national politics. This is evident in Brazilians' pride in Petrobras, the state-owned petrol company that produces more than two million barrels of oil and natural gas per day.

.. e destaca tb as iniciativas no Perú.

Peru has rivalled Brazil in proclaiming the open source revolution in the boldest terms. As early as 2002 the Peruvian government passed a bill that defended the mandatory use of open source software by the state as essential in fulfilling its obligations to its citizens.

In an open letter to Microsoft Peru, Congressman Dr Edgar Villanueva stated three fundamental democratic values embodied in the responsibilities of government that demanded the use of open source:

* Free access to public information by the citizen, which could only be guaranteed by the use of standard and open formats.

* Proprietary formats, such as .doc used by Microsoft Word, for example, were unsuitable for encoding public data because it placed control of access to that data in the hands of one company instead of the government.

* Ensuring the permanence of public data, which required software that could be used and maintained in the long term without depending "on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them".

Só acho pouco produtiva, hipócrita e oportunista a coisa do anti-americanismo...

Pode até servir para quem não entende nada de tecnologia e da esquerda atrasada que ainda apoia o Chavez, mas até onde eu sei gde parte dos entusiastas do movimento Open Source são americanos...

Além disso, em todos os projetos que eu conheço não existe distinção de nacionalidade entre os colaboradores e líderes. É preciso combater esse nacionalismo anacrõnico...