The Digital Americas Summit in Sao Paulo was indeed a success, as Tom Lenard noted. Among the hot topics debated was open source software, and the Brazilian government's stance on supporting and/or adopting it.

Government procurement is a pillar to strengthen Brazilian companies, and free software is an opportunity for Brazil, said Marylin Peixoto da Silva Nogueira, undersecretary for Information Technology Policy at the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology. But after saying this, she quickly said she had a message from her boss: "We are not taking sides, we believe there must be a balance," she said. "It's not necessarily proprietary versus free. Of course, free is not necessarily free."

Several speakers at the conference made clear that they do not believe governments should take sides and lock governments in to one format such as open source software. SOFTEX Vice President Marcio Girao said the Lula government should be praised for being the first to include software in its economic growth agenda, but raised alarms about government adoption of open source software. "People are legalizing demand of free software," he said, adding he is "vehemently opposed to this." "We support free software" at SOFTEX and have participated in fora focused on its development, but said "we cannot be in favor of free software being put like in a cast into legal measures the government wants to do." (I'm sure his argument was more elegantly phrased in its original Portuguese, this is of course the translation I heard over the headphones.)

PFF's Jim DeLong reminded attendees that the open source world has two sides - the Free Culture Movement that believes proprietary software is evil, and the branch dominated by large companies providing services and proprietary software on top of open source software. While some view open source as the path to open standards and interoperability, Jim said, that is most certainly not the only path to that goal. "Open source and open standards are not the same," he said. He also warned, as he and others have warned elsewhere, that revisions being made to the General Public License could make it far more difficult to make companies using open source software to continue to do so, as they may be forced to reveal their source code under GPLv3. He warned a Brazilian government official to monitor the development of GPLv3 very carefully.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 11:00 AM | Digital Americas, International, Software

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