Venezuela Open Source (O'Reilly)

What's this? I haven't heard that!

Heh, no, but you could search the major bittorrent trackers for the binaries. Try for the terms cne tascon venezuela ... that should do the trick.

There is a .rar archive on the net that contains a compressed nero image.

Seeing is believing!

Please excuse my repeat reply to the same post, but while googling, I found this website, http://www.maisantalist.com/, from which one can download this application it directly.

Still no sources though :(

This is a position usually assumed by opponents within Venezuela, who are acutely aware of the issues involved.

It's slightly more difficult to assume this position from outside Venezuela, because the country's oil production has, is and will be used as an oversize menacing club with which to further government political interests. Testimony to this can be borne by small countries like El Salvador, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic that have crumbled before Venezuelan interests and big ones like the US, that has flexibly bent every which way to avoid hiccups in the stream of oil shipments.

> The man was elected by the poor, the majority of the country, and claims to be working in their interest. That claim is for them to judge and they seem to be judging in his favor.

This statement is initially quite correct. His electoral base was fundamentally the poor and needy, back in 1998.

Since then, however, his policy has been basically to divide the country, playing one sector off against another, with a view to facilitating his stay in power and his control over the country.

To bring us back down to earth, though, a curious phenomenom has recently ocurred in the context of the recent elections to the National Assembly. It has been recently proven in front of international observers representing the OAS and the EC, that the entire, highly computerized voting apparatus can be used to figure out who voted for whom in real time nationwide.

Because of this appalling discovery, which has been suspected for a long time by opposition factors and publically denied by officials of the local electoral council, there has been a very strong upsurge of mistrust against the electoral council causing an important segment of the opposition to withdraw from elections alleging lack of fair conditions.

The election went ahead anyway but despite Chavez's party's extremely advantageous position, wild expenditure of public funds, open threats by officials against government employees who wouldn't vote and blatant generalized disregard for electoral rules, the election was transformed into a plebescite regarding Chavez's approval when the opposition withdrew from the elections with a resulting: 25% of the registry voted, half of which were protest null votes (figures courtesy of the electoral council) ... demonstrating that even with their figures, they admit to approximately 12% support. Local pundits speculate that his real support is much less than that.

I often wonder what the Venezuelan government gives back to open source and what the true motivation for adoption is.

> Back on topic, any move towards free software and openness is a move toward democracy, and we should support it even from the most vile dictator.

It makes me uneasy knowing that "vile dictators" are harnessing the world's finest intellect to do their darkest deeds and shudder to think, as should we all, of the million ways that a country's government in cahoots with its other supposedly independent executive entities, acting as one giant monolithic block can suffocate a populace using FOSS. To be fair, probably many other governments would do the same thing, if they could.