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Activists Urge Free Open-Source Software
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=457338
By ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil
Jan 31, 2005
Activists at a leftist gathering where Microsoft is viewed as a
corporate bogeyman urged developing nations Saturday to leap into the
information age with free open-source software.
John Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, told a gathering inside a
packed warehouse that poor nations can't solve their problems unless
they stop paying expensive software licensing fees.
Open source software includes programs that are not controlled by a
single company. The software can be developed by anyone, with few
restrictions. The best known such software is the Linux operating
system, which can be downloaded free from the Internet.
"Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software
than it spends on hunger," said Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace civil liberties group. Top Stories
The session was one of several at the World Social Forum, which has
drawn tens of thousands of people to an annual protest against the World
Economic Forum, a gathering of world leaders now underway in Davos,
Switzerland.
The activists in Brazil are generally united in their oppositon to what
many call unbridled capitalism and the policies of the Bush
administration. They are also promoting hundreds of causes, ranging from
opposition to genetically modified crops to free distribution of land to
poor farmers.
Barlow said Brazil is trying to wean itself from Microsoft with a
campaign to persuade Brazilians to shift from costly Windows products to
applications that run on the Linux operating system.
Microsoft contends open-source software can be more expensive than
Windows programs when service costs are factored in.
How much people spend on Microsoft products is unclear because the
company often provides discounts when it senses it may lose business.
However, competition from open-source software has prompted Microsoft to
offer those discounts.
Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's administration says the
open-source policy makes sense for a developing country where a mere 10
percent of the 182 million people have computers at home, and where the
debt-laden government is the nation's biggest computer buyer.
China, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea also are pursuing
open-source alternatives. In a partial response to the open-source
threat and to piracy, Microsoft last year launched stripped-down, cheap
versions of Windows in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Similar
products are on the way for India and Russia.
Joining Barlow on Saturday were Brazilian pop superstar Gilberto Gil,
who is Brazil's minister of culture, and Lawrence Lessig, Stanford
University law professor and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit
organization devoted to sharing creative material online.
All the social forum's 800 computers are running on open-source
software, but the loosely organized event ran into an embarrassing
glitch Saturday when two big screens betrayed the fact that the computer
was running on Windows, with the operating system's toolbar visible at
the bottom of the screens.
Lessig noticed and the computer was quickly disconnected and replaced
with a laptop running on open-source software.
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Also in this issue....
- East & Southeast Asia: An Annotated Directory of Internet Resources
- HP: We have the next transistor
- Take a virtual walk with Amazon's A9
- Microsoft launches its own search
- Clever cars taking to the road
- Sun Microsystems Unveils Grid Computing
- Activists Urge Free Open-Source Software
- Researchers Claim to Crack Car Key Code
- Mozilla Updates Firefox 2 Plans
- Brazil Reshapes Debate on Intellectual Property
- Blogger Takes On U.S. Military
- Prison Time For Teen Virus Guru
- Identity Theft, Net Scams Rose in '04-FTC
- Lawyers form group to aid open source code writers
- EU opens door to Gates, but not on Windows
- Dark fiber: Businesses see the light
- Congress proposes tax on all Net, data connections
- Law barring spam allows a flood instead
- Employees to be billed for personal Internet use?
Member: Association for International Business
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