LWN: Comments on "A look at free software in Ecuador"

A look at free software in...

melenti — 2008-12-17T19:13:34+00:00

Its PHP as far AS I can see there are good CMS there , I will try to check that too so maybe it has many good ideas for Melenti Thanks!!

A look at free software in...

gvy — 2008-12-12T13:53:29+00:00

I'll prefer TYPO3 -- stable for years, GPL right from the start, and being real enterprise-class by now.

Just in case, on mailing lists writing in ALL CAPS is usually treated like being blonde, sort of. People whose software I tend to use generally tend to avoid that; it's not the tools that make product, it's the people.

SRI and FOSS in Ecuador

rafael-ec — 2008-12-09T14:42:48+00:00

Actually you still have to use a windows client to report taxes here in Ecuador. Any way i know people from SRI who wants to migrate the system to java so it would be multiplataform and hopefully make it free.

The good thing about the way you report taxes is that there is an open format made with xml so in theory anyone could make and application for this and make it free software. This hasn't happend yet.

Anyway there are a lot of things goin on in Ecuador in favor of free software and that is thanks to free software activists in our community.

Best Regards,

Rafael Bonifaz

A look at free software in Ecuador

melenti — 2008-12-09T12:51:43+00:00

Hello jpetso,

The thing with JAVA is that is in principle ALL STANDARD all over the world, and we will be using standard architecture and JAVA SCRIPTING LANGUAGE like Groovy to make the GADGETS to work simply and make development a lot easier for JAVA DEVELOPERS. Im nos saying COMMON people will write gadgets, as the same happens in Joomla, only experienced PHP developers undesrtand Joomla so I dont think this will be aproblem for developers.

I have used Joomla for 5 years now we know it and we support it. But when we put it in a web site called www.iess.gov.ec the social security portal of our country simply could handle massive transactions. We used in that time DOT CMS and we had not even the slightest problem.

We will be releasing a Working Alpha version this January and I invite you to try it and make comments about it !!!

Thanks a lot for your interest and comments. Bye

Adrian Cadena
Melenti CMS

SRI and FOSS in Ecuador

yodermk — 2008-12-09T08:53:19+00:00

Speaking of education, I have a friend who was at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. There, Macs were/are really big ... what most people (at least in the arts) use. At least it's not Windows. I wonder if students there are starting to get the "Linux bug".

Can't wait for my next trip to Ecuador, though it is not planned at the moment. :(

SRI and FOSS in Ecuador

mfioretti — 2008-12-09T07:25:58+00:00

yodermk,

during my talks with people in the subsecretariat nobody mentioned the SRI, though it may be one of those 45 central institutions which will share one FOSS-based document server, so my impression is that they have other priorities now.

This said, I was helped by attending a week-long event focused on FOSS, but I can confirm that I saw a lot of interest in FOSS at all levels (activists, educational institutions, government representatives) *beyond* the congress, so I fully agree that there are lots of good things ahead.

Thanks for your comment,

Marco

Usage of Melenti

mfioretti — 2008-12-09T07:14:14+00:00

Jpetso,

even *my* own personal impression of what Adrian told me is that Melenti will be more useful in complex environments than for shared hosting of personal pages. However, I've asked Adrian to answer directly as soon as the article goes public, so stay tuned for more info.

Thanks for your interest in the article!

Marco

A look at free software in Ecuador

yodermk — 2008-12-08T10:02:51+00:00

As one who has quite a few Ecuadorian stamps in my passport ...

I'd be interested in whether there are any reforms in the SRI (the Ecuadorian IRS). When I was working at the jungle hospital in Shell (late 2006), our accountant had to use Internet Explorer to report tax information to the government. Obviously lots of room for more openness there.

I guess these government reforms are a direct result of the election of Rafeal Correa as president (which happened shortly before I left). I was a bit nervous about a friend of Hugo Chavez taking office there, but he was probably better than the alternative.

I saw some Ecuadorian interest in Linux, but not on the scale described in the article. Looks like good things ahead!

A look at free software in Ecuador

jpetso — 2008-12-04T22:00:13+00:00

Writing Melenti "gadgets", that is plugins, should also be easier than with Joomla, Drupal, Php-nuke and similar products. This because, says Adrian, "unlike those products, Java has worldwide standards like Spring, JPA, JSF, GWT and so on: new developers can just take a look at the core Melenti API and start writing their own gadgets in no time."

Er, cool. Like, instead of having to know just the Melenti API, I need to know the Melenti API plus all of those other dinosaurs, plus how they interact with the CMS. Looks like that will make plugin development *really* easy.

But I guess there's still room for a CMS aimed at enterprise integration. Just the "personal web pages" aim sounds a bit unrealistic. (Java on shared hosts, anyone? As competitor against Drupal and Joomla? Er, sure.)

Most of the stuff mentioned in the article is pretty cool, though.