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.
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.
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.
Largely because of taxes. Brazilian taxes are extremely high.
http://www.quantocustaobrasil.com.br/site/downloads/impostos...
This table is in Portuguese but it's easy to understand. The second column means the tax percentage of certain product / service.
It's published by the union of Ministry of Finance's workers.
Those are not for imports. In the case of computers, since we do not produce them, the taxes are much higher. Pretty much all eletronics cost between 2 to 3x as much as they would in the US.
Yes. If we want to buy an Amazon Kindle that will cost exactly 2x times the original price. It is the most expensive Kindle in the world (the second is India, with around 1.3x the original price). It is ridiculous.
Yesterday I was walking in front of an operator store (Vivo) and saw the first Samsung Galaxy (i7500) for sale. Unfortunately I had one i7500 a few years ago. The price: 899 BRL (around 578 dollars).
The government's version would always cost less, since you can subtract profits and the costs of features / expenditure to support other customers.
Aren't there already counterexamples of government products costing more to end users than privately produced products, even in the world of software. Certainly there is no general principle in economics that that which is done by state actors is less expensive than that which is done by private actors. Often the situation is exactly the other way around, with government services being much more expensive than privately delivered services.
You sound like you misinterpreted va_coder. He remarked that a number of large governments do not do this. He did not say that no large government at all do this.
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.
Even more, I've come to I feel like "the success of the Linux desktop" among government agencies or large corporations may not be even the success that free software can really benefit from.
If desktop Linux becomes a bare-bone usable thing along the joyless lines of well-written bureaucratic forms, it won't be a tool for empowering users.
It seems like free software advocates should be aiming instead to create software so people are excite to use it, in the spirit of Apple (despite Apple's hostility to free software). On the user-end of things, only programs of this quality I know are Firefox and Inkscape though I'm sure there are others. In any case, I think this is the only direction that will make free software really succeed on the level of promoting freedom.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
32 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 56.5 ms ] threadWhy 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.
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.
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.
Aren't there already counterexamples of government products costing more to end users than privately produced products, even in the world of software. Certainly there is no general principle in economics that that which is done by state actors is less expensive than that which is done by private actors. Often the situation is exactly the other way around, with government services being much more expensive than privately delivered services.
The thing we use to communicate rests on an infrastructure called the internet - A US Government funded Project (DARPA):-)
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.
Even more, I've come to I feel like "the success of the Linux desktop" among government agencies or large corporations may not be even the success that free software can really benefit from.
If desktop Linux becomes a bare-bone usable thing along the joyless lines of well-written bureaucratic forms, it won't be a tool for empowering users.
It seems like free software advocates should be aiming instead to create software so people are excite to use it, in the spirit of Apple (despite Apple's hostility to free software). On the user-end of things, only programs of this quality I know are Firefox and Inkscape though I'm sure there are others. In any case, I think this is the only direction that will make free software really succeed on the level of promoting freedom.
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.
I think developed countries also have a lot to gain from following these ideas
And seems that their commitment to software public is very real from the highest level of goverment.
President Lula DaSilva was mentioned several times.