BBC.co.uk/news

It can only be a good thing!

arriba! andale andale!

(dangit, thats spanish, not portugese.)

I really appreciate how Brazil is starting to stand on its own feet and take on the unfairness of the world.

(I also really like thier airport security system- what a country does to them, it will do to its citizens.) off topic, sorry. cool article.

ahh.. more fud. Only on some Distros- and if the source is freely available- then anyone can fix it.

Today on "Folha de São Paulo" my local newspaper: (Brazilian) Airforce and Navy begin substituction of all their Windows OSes by Linux Ones. The airforce and the Nevy follow the Army example how is in the middle of the substitutiong process. More then half the more then 30.000 Army computers already use Free Software. The substitution is expected to end by Decenber this year. (sorry for my poor translation).

He lack the money, but we got the guts =P

I've loved this slogan: "we lack the money, but we got the guts" I'd like Brazil did everything thinking like that, but this is off topic. The most important in my opinion is not the cost of software, since this kind of argument may be countered by those TCOs supposed arguments from MS. The most important to me is the reasoning that lies behind the Armed Forces decisions as well as behind the Munich decision: even if Open Source wasn't free in the economic sense, it must be used since its source is auditable and you know what you're putting in your computers. This is safer and stabler. I've read somewhere about a company that sold cryptography software with intentional backdoors for legal reasons. But what kind of encryption and security is that?? That's the reason why PGP is better in this case and Open Source software in general is a better governmental choice.

Microsoft is entirely right, believe it or not, to say that "open source software can have hidden costs." But what it neglects to mention is that closed-source software has hidden costs, too. All software, and particularly operating-system software, is quite expensive .. whether or not source code is available, and whether or not the source-license costs money. These costs come from the human time needed to install, update, maintain, and service the systems. Linux bears those costs, too.

The statement that open-source is "less secure," however, is flat wrong. As any auditor will tell you.

Perhaps, instead of fruitlessly railing against "open source," Microsoft should look at what its customers are actually saying. When key customers are abandoning your products, at considerable cost and inconvenience to themselves, you're doing something very wrong.

For instance:

• What's so wrong with offering a source-code license to Microsoft Windows? Set a suitable price for it, oblige the customer to sign the usual non-disclosure agreements and to submit to reasonable audit requirements, and let them have it.
• "Obviously, your customer service sucks, and you should be doing something about that." The license-costs of Windows are not prohibitive, so if customers are complaining it must be something else. Establish real service-level agreements with these customers and stick to them ... using service personnel who live, preferably, in Brazil. (In other words, not in Bangladesh.)
• "When in doubt, watch IBM." They're still the grandaddy of them all. They still have customers who swear by them. And, in case you haven't noticed, they're embracing open source. Yes, they offer source-code licenses to a great many of their systems. And they support them, "like a real operating-system deserves."

The need to have the source available in a public environment is obvious, as well as the need to audit. Its not only a matter of cost, as was already said. A government can't have citizens data stored on a black box, and yet be credible.

Another huge issue here in brazil was the software that runs the digital voting machine. We are replacing the traditional vote by paper with a small box where voters type their candidates. In the end of the day the machine outputs the sums to a floppy. Before you ask, the machines are OFFLINE. Every voting district has one.

The problem is that the OS in the machine isn't auditable, instead, its proprietary closed source. It has raised a great deal of confusion and arguing, as you can imagine.

Yep, we have Windows in the voting machine. At least it works great! Imagine if you had to see a blue screen of death while voting!

He, Iv'e seen those darn blue screens on some of the mini banks here in Norway (I believe most runs win2k)

Wierd. The entire banking system in Brazil is based in cobol programs running on diverse *nixes. No blue screen in our banks :^)

I believe the mini banks (I beliave you were refering to those machines where you put the card and get the money? What would that be called?) are 386 or even older running IBM Unix.

The potential is bigger than just the license cost. it is true that there is the emergence of a home bred industry at stake. Just look what product connectiva managed.

just think though... saving $120 million! that's a huge amount of money for a country like brazil. that alone can help them get on their feet, and enhance thier IT sector. not to mention, the computer users there will be much smarter being able to utilize linux rather than being spoonfed by windows os's.

That´s the spirit.
The problem is there´s people inside government which profits by lobbying pro microsoft. There are lobbists for every corporate area, and couldn´t be different on IT.

The society at large could show a bit more guts when defending public interest, I think.

hehe... they even have some good busses also there -->

ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=56158

scroll down on that link to see the pictures

this forum would not let me post an url because i hadn't posted 5 messages...now i have ... so...i post the url also here -->
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=56158