Friends: Our President, Dr Kalam, has suggested on more than one occasion that we should adopt open source software. Brazil is adopting open source software (Linux, etc.) in a big way with full state support. In India there are several groups who are promoting the use of open source, but many state governments have tied up with compnies producing proprietary software! Also many Indians are contributing in a significant way to the advancement of open source software. Of course companies have marketing power, but open source advocates are distributed all over and are not yet able to match the marketing (and advertising) power of companies. Fortunately, companies such as IBM are now coming round to promoting open source software. Arun ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Carvin" To: "The Digital Divide Network discussion group" Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 10:07 PM Subject: [DDN] Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend (fwd)

From the New York Times....

Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend

This article profiles Brazil's PC Conectado program, which will distribute computers and low-cost Internet access to one million low-income Brazilian families. The government is currently debating whether all of these machines should be installed with proprietary or free/open source software.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/technology/29computer.html

-- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com -----------------------------------