[Fsfe-uk] [Fwd: Venezuela, Brazil, free software]

[Graham Seaman]

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Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:04:37 -0300
From: Coordinadores de Hipatia
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To: Coordinadores de Hipatia <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
Subject: [hipatia] Venezuela


http://www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=26485


TECHNOLOGY-VENEZUELA:
Heading Towards Free Software
Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 30 (IPS) - Venezuela, following in Brazil's footsteps, has joined
the club of countries that are adopting and promoting free or open-source
software, in a bid to save money, achieve technological independence, and
strengthen alliances among countries of the developing South.

”We are working on a decree to make it official and obligatory in Venezuela to
acquire and foment the use of free software in the public administration,”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced in a recent forum on technology
held in Caracas.

But government entities are not waiting for the presidential decree, and have
already begun to migrate to open-source software programmes, which tend to be
free of charge, unlike the proprietary operating systems sold by corporations
like Microsoft and Unisys.

”The Education Ministry's central database alone has saved 2.2 million dollars
by adopting free software this year,” Carlos Joa, president of the Bolivarian
Foundation of Information Technology and Telematics (FUNDABIT), the Ministry's
technological arm, told IPS.

The Education Ministry's 2002-2007 plan contemplates the installation of
380,000 computers in 10,000 centres that will serve 23,000 primary schools
with a combined total of eight million students.

At today's prices ”some 400 million dollars in hardware will be spent, and if
we had to pay licensing fees for proprietary software on top of that, we would
perhaps have to spend the same amount or even more on administrative and
educational operating systems,” said Joa.

Last year, the Venezuelan government paid 7.5 million dollars in software
licensing fees, and another 12.5 million for data processing, said former
planning minister Felipe Pérez Martí.

It is not yet possible to estimate the savings that will be involved in moving
to free software in a country like Venezuela, which has a population of 25
million and a gross domestic product (GDP) of just over 100 billion dollars.

But Brazil, a pioneer in Latin America in switching to free software, which
has a population of nearly 180 million and a GDP five times that of Venezuela,
could spend four billion dollars a year on software, Antonio Albuquerque with
the Brazilian Communications Ministry said at the ”first World Forum on Free
Technology” held Nov. 17-20 in Caracas.

The decision by the government of left-leaning President Luiz Inácio ”Lula” da
Silva in Brazil to make the move to open-source software throughout the public
sector is based on economic considerations, as well as the search for
technological autonomy and the aim of sharing knowledge.

Another reason is national security. The Lula administration argues that the
government and armed forces in Brazil should not be reliant on the
closed-source codes of proprietary software systems, which are hidden from the
users, who therefore have no way of determining if there are ”backdoors”
vulnerable to attack by viruses and hackers.

Free software ”can stimulate the development of technologies to share with
Argentina, Chile, China, India and other nations of the South, creating a
technological foundation for South-South trade and cooperation,” Albuquerque
commented to IPS.

For his part, Pérez Martí, who heads the non-governmental organisation
Conexión Libre in Venezuela, said ”Technology is a tool for giving power to
the people.”

”Free software is a way of producing and disseminating a public good -
knowledge,” he added.

The movement is based on the concept that ”any computer user has the right to
copy and modify the software he or she is using,” Richard Stallman, considered
the ”founding father” of the free software movement in the United States, said
at the Caracas forum.

”Governments are starting to get interested in the benefits,” Stallman,
co-creator of the nonproprietary Linux/GNU operating system, told IPS. ”Free
software can help society leave behind eternal technological dependency and
help set it free.”

”The United States wants that to be illegal, and is trying to get other
countries to pass similar laws. That is why we owe a debt to Lula, who
rejected that point in the FTAA (the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of
the Americas),” he added.

Brazil has also clashed with the United States over the issue of free software
in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) multilateral trade talks.

In May 2003, the local government in Munich, Germany's third-largest city,
became the first public administration of a major city to adopt free software.
Since then, the migration to open-source systems, like the Linux operating
system, the OpenOffice office productivity application suite, and the Mozilla
browser, has continued apace in Europe.

Of course none of this pleases the large corporations vending proprietary
software. At a recent meeting of Asian government leaders in Singapore,
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warned that governments could face a slate of
lawsuits if they used Linux instead of Windows, for example.

Linux violates more than 228 patents, said Ballmer, who added that ”Some day,
for all countries that are entering the WTO, somebody will come and look for
money owing to the rights for that intellectual property.”

Besides, he added, ”We think our software is far more secure than open-source
software. It is more secure because we stand behind it, we fixed it, because
we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software.”

But governments that are moving to free software base that decision on other
considerations. ”Besides the cost advantage, there is the question of
standardisation. We can create software adapted to our needs, without being
tied to any specific brand, which makes it easier for us when it comes to a
public tender for acquiring software,” said Joa.

On the other hand, ”states and other users can modify the programmes as they
wish. We don't have to ask permission each time we want to adapt them, and
that gives us an advantage for unifying our systems and databases around the
country,” he added.

Eduardo Samán, with the governmental Intellectual Property Service of
Venezuela, also believes that ”the open-source system facilitates the creation
of more software, with more engineers producing and generating added value. It
is a democratisation process that runs counter to the raking in of profits by
a single firm through proprietary software,” he told IPS.

Pérez Martí said Conexión Libre, in conjunction with ruling coalition
legislators, will submit a bill on free information and software technology,
”to foment production of software in the public administration and in
Venezuela's economic and social system.”

”Our slogan is 'as much free software as possible,” he added. (END/2004)

   * TECHNOLOGY: Brazil Leads the Way in the Free Software Movement
   * Free Software Foundation
   * Conexión Social - in Spanish
--
Diego Saravia 
address@hidden

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