

Brazilian government signs up to develop OpenOffice and LibreOffice - Tsiolkovsky
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Brazilian-government-signs-up-to-develop-OpenOffice-and-LibreOffice-1275068.html

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elviejo
Brazil has had a big-success with their free-software initiatives.

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.

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rlander
Too bad it only applies to desktop software. They are still one of the top
purchasers of proprietary network/server software in Brazil.

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elviejo
[citation needed] On this past month I went to a couple of conferences where
they showed how they build their infraestructure and their software as a
service.

And seems that their commitment to software public is very real from the
highest level of goverment.

President Lula DaSilva was mentioned several times.

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rlander
For 6 yers I worked as a network engineer for Cisco, primarily with the
government and Serpro (Federal Data Processing Service), the biggest IT
service provider in Brazil. I can tell you from first-hand experience that
there's no server/networking open source focus there.

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praptak
Good, although with caution. Governments are not exactly known for being great
with software development.

~~~
pvarangot
In this particular case, neither is Microsoft.

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.

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va_coder
Why on earth does any large government on earth not do this?

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arthur_debert
Because it is not its core business? Look, anywhere you look, the government
could, in theory step into production of X and save money. The government's
version would always cost less, since you can subtract profits and the costs
of features / expenditure to support other customers.

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.

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rbanffy
I fail to see where the article implies Brazilan government would try to
control either office suite. What I read was they would work together and
support. If they hire a dozen developers (and, from my experience with FLOSS
within the Brazilian government, they would be very clever people) we should
be happy, right?

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.

~~~
arthur_debert
The language of the letter is pretty vague, it mentions "creation of a
collaboration group to develop" which can be pretty munch anything (or nothing
at all, actually).

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.

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sheffield
Good news, but I don't understand why both? Why don't they choose one
(preferably LibreOffice)?

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juliano_q
Brazilian government is using open source software for several years, and
almost every software made by the government uses Java. The open-source
initiative is nice, but the software produced use to be mediocre at best.

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ccanassa
They are just trying to find more ways to waste my taxes

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dots
This is a real win-win deal!

