For several years now, largely under the rest of the world's radar, the Brazilian government has been building a counterculture of its own. The battlefield has been intellectual property - the ownership of ideas - and the revolution has touched everything, from internet filesharing to GM crops to HIV medication....
[T]he left-wing administration of President Luiz Inacio da Silva, or "Lula", has announced that all ministries will stop using Microsoft Windows on their office computers. Instead of paying through the nose for Microsoft operating licences, while millions of Brazilians live in poverty, the government will use open-source software, collaboratively designed by programmers worldwide and owned by no one.
"This isn't just my idea, or Brazil's idea," Gil says. "It's the idea of our time. The complexity of our times demands it." He is politician enough to hold back from endorsing the breaking of laws, for example on music downloading, but only just. "The Brazilian government is definitely pro-law," he grins. "But if law doesn't fit reality anymore, law has to be changed. That's not a new thing. That's civilisation as usual."
Several concepts worth noting here:
1) Commercial OS licenses are expensive, almost prohibitively so;
2) If your country is mired in debt and poverty, finding an OS solution that is not prohibitively expensive makes sense (i.e., employ programmers and keep your money invested in your community);
3) Employing open source solutions is "the idea of our time;" Web 2.0 is not a fad; technology will continue to change and develop more rapidly than a licensing scheme will adequately allow; and
4) the Revolution will not be televised -- it will be uploaded and downloaded by millions of people around the globe.
Keywords: Brazil, culture, file sharing, Gilberto Gil, Microsoft, open source, politics, Web 2.0
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