[Fsf-friends] Brazilian Citizen Petitions President-elect for Free Software

[Tarun Gaur]

Hi Friends,

An Article in Linux Today ....
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Brazilian Citizen Petitions President-elect for Free Software
Dec 14, 2002, 04 :00 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (78 reads)

A Brazilian citizen has started up his own online petition to persuade 
Brazillan President-elect Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to end government 
funding of foreign proprietary software firms and instead turn government 
software spending towards free and open-source software.

The petition, which is being hosted at PetitionsOnline.com, is a brief 
missive to President-elect Lula urging him to divert funding from purchasing 
software from companies such as Microsoft and use the savings to facilitate 
the transition to free software.

The arguments made by the petition are relatively straightforward: shifting 
the government to using only free software would not only save funds right 
off the top, but ideally would seed citizen's use of similar technology.

This is a familiar argument, having been used in Israel and other nations to 
promote the use of government free software use.

The petition specifically highlights the Brazilian government's relationship 
with Microsoft--a government the petition cites as providing 80 percent of 
all of Microsoft's sales in Brazil.

The author of the survey is Renato Siqueira, who describes himself as "a 
Brazilian how cares how the public administration and people spend money in 
my country."

Siqueira plans to have the petition online until it has acquired 500,000 
signatures. While not a member of any free software of Linux group, 
Siqueira, a self-proclaimed "GNU/Linux lover" would certainly weclome 
assistance from "any free software group wants to help me with marketing or 
training in GNU/Linux..."

The petition is only valid to Brazilian citizens, though Siqueira indicated 
that any comments on his efforts would be welcomed and most likely posted on 
his own personal weblog.

How President-elect Lula would react to this petition should be interesting, 
particularly is the requistite half million signatures are gathered.

As a member of the Workers' Party in Brazil, Lula has in the past been very 
left on the political spectrum. Some have described him as socialist. Even 
though he turned to more centrist views during this current successful 
presidential campaign, Lula has always maintained very strong ties with 
Brazilian labor groups. Not surprising given his backgound of 20 years as a 
labor negotiator.

Given his leanings away from big business, Lula may be a powerful ally in 
shifting government software use towards a free or open source environment. 
With Brazil currently having the eighth largest economy in the world, that 
will mean big stakes for proprietary software vendors.

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regards,,
tarun gaur




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