Brazilian government signs up to develop OpenOffice and LibreOffice
h-online.com
h-online.com
Government departments are required to try to buy free-software solutions and try to find local companies that can provide support for those solutions.
Besides any contract-development goverment signs must be realeased as free-software.
They call it "software publico" (public software) since they consider a duty of the government to provide their solutions in a free-software form.
I think they are an example for any developing country economy.
I think developed countries also have a lot to gain from following these ideas
And seems that their commitment to software public is very real from the highest level of goverment.
President Lula DaSilva was mentioned several times.
I'm from a Spanish-speaking country and multi-language support for Office behaves weirder with every release since I can remember using it. It likes defaulting to English or Spanish in a paragraph basis even when you already told it to use another default language for all documents, and it likes to do it in the middle of your writing. I believe that support for Portuguese is equally lacking. It is my hope that Brazil's investment results in better multi-language support in Open and Libre.
The thing we use to communicate rests on an infrastructure called the internet - A US Government funded Project (DARPA):-)
Even more, I've come to I feel like "the success of the Linux desktop" among government agencies or large corporations may not be even the success that free software can really benefit from.
If desktop Linux becomes a bare-bone usable thing along the joyless lines of well-written bureaucratic forms, it won't be a tool for empowering users.
It seems like free software advocates should be aiming instead to create software so people are excite to use it, in the spirit of Apple (despite Apple's hostility to free software). On the user-end of things, only programs of this quality I know are Firefox and Inkscape though I'm sure there are others. In any case, I think this is the only direction that will make free software really succeed on the level of promoting freedom.
Why doesn't the US gov just create a telco? Or any large supplier, really?
This sounds good in theory, but in practice it tends to put the state machinery in charge of managing things it's largely incapable of.
I'd much rather the government would show support either by donations (and let Apache Foundation / whomever manage their own thing), or just creating stimulus plans with the money saved (say, for example to make sure computers did not costs 3x as much in Brazil as they do in the US).
The public sector has many restrictions (elections every few years changing management, very much subject to political pressures, larger bureaucracy etc) that make it a bad competitor in a number of business.
I also see this commitment would go a long way in creating and documenting the means to support OOo an LO in very large installations, helping develop the technologies companies would use to deploy them.
I am not sure the Brazilian gov hiring developers is the best course of action. I'd much rather have it fund Apache Soft, Mozilla, or any other organization that knows how to do it.
In my experience, pretty much ever govt software I've interacted with (imposto de renda, nota fiscal paulista, the portal brasil fluke?) is incredibly bad. I fail to see the hand on clever people in them.
Aren't there already counterexamples of government products costing more to end users than privately produced products, even in the world of software. Certainly there is no general principle in economics that that which is done by state actors is less expensive than that which is done by private actors. Often the situation is exactly the other way around, with government services being much more expensive than privately delivered services.