Following a growing trend Brazil will be moving to open source software in the hopes of keeping their costs down. Some Brazilians are already using 86 Telecentro free computer centers in Sao Paulo and those systems use open source software prompting one user to say:
If this was a rich country, it wouldn’t matter and we could buy Microsoft products, but we’re a developing country and Linux is just a lot more accessible, so we’re heading toward a Linux generation.
Strange concept in our land dominated by Windows, it’s hard to imagine someone who has always used Linux and feels more at home with it when going to access the net for free. Some people here don’t even know they are using one kind of operating system, they only think it’s a computer, some people in Brazil will feel the same but with software that doesn’t come from the Evil Empire.
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Yeah, I know people at work that think Macs run on Windows. And corporate-trust-apologists like .NET developer John Carroll (today pontificating in his usual, sophistical manner about the MS antitrust suits in Europe, on ZDNN) help entrench that worldview.
This is just as much a part of that “North-South” issue as, say, multinational oil companies in Nigeria or the DeBeers cartel and blood diamonds. Only I don’t know if Microsoft would pressure the US government to stage a CIA-backed coup to install a WinTel-compatible president.