The other side [LWN.net]

The other side

Posted Jun 14, 2003 0:29 UTC (Sat) by hmh (subscriber, #3838)
Parent article: Opinion on Brazil making Open Source mandatory in government

Here is a healthy dose of Brazilian reality: The only thing that doesn't result in export of US$ (the hard currency, which we DON'T have nearly enough in Brazil, mind you) sooner or later is software (may be proprietary) running on top of free software.

There are no "proprietary OSes" made in Brazil (of notice anyway). And we sort of have a strong monopoly on OS rooted deeply in here, which makes it an uneven playing field for any other OSes (proprietary or not).

Now, explain to me why, given our current economics and US$ reserves, we should even consider trying for a "level playing field" for software? We are NOT talking long term concerns here, but medium term ones, and the current software market is anything but a "level playing field" anyway.

Also, most of the time, proprietary software in government means your well known Microsoft Office + Windows combo, which also results in a lot of US$ leaving the country as licenses for no other reason then the fact that people don't know how to use something else for an office suite. Oh, maybe 1% of those people DO need something the free office suites and OSes won't provide, but that's why nobody is mandating 100% of the software to be free software.

You need a top-down aproach to get your usual government worker to switch away from the "market standard" due to the extremely heavy social inertia, you see. Otherwise, things just move too slowly.

On that light, it makes a LOT of sense to use a heavy hand on forcing the public servants (government workers) to switch to Free Software where possible.

Maybe in a few years no such measures will be needed, but right now it is not a matter of technical excelence. It is economics. We are probably better off if the government ends up spending twice the money it is spending now with licenses in indirect software costs (training, etc) as long as that money won't leave the country.

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