Brazil, Free Software and "Castrated Windows"

Like many, I've been keeping my eye on the Brazilian computer market, since there seems to be a lot happening there in terms of free software. Details have been dribbling out here and there, but this is by far the best summary of the situation there:

Brazil imported the anti-Microsoft stance common in American geeks, but on top of the usual arguments Microsoft is foreign. This adds fuel to the flame. To the Brazilian Microsoft hater, not only there is an “evil monopoly”, but its profits are repatriated and its jobs are elsewhere. Practices like the 3-program limitation on Vista Starter further erode good will (Brazilians call it the “castrated Windows” among other colorful names). Add a dash of anti-American sentiment and you’ve got some serious resistance. This fiery mood has a strong influence, from the teenager hanging out in #hackers on Brasnet to IT departments to the federal government. Even in a rational self-interest analysis, one might rightly point out that if free/open source software (FOSS) were to wipe out Windows, negative effects on Brazil’s economy are likely minimal. The wealth, jobs, and opportunity created by Microsoft aren’t in Brazil (productivity gains might be, but that’s a whole different argument). The trade offs of a potential Linux/Google take over are different when there’s no national off-the-shelf software industry, plus Google’s revenue model works beautifully in a developing country. This mix of ideological and rational arguments torpedoes Microsoft’s support.

...

Now people in Brazil can actually develop interesting and widely used programs. We’ve got kernel hackers like Marcelo Tosatti, who maintained the 2.4 Linux kernel series, and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, who co-founded the Conectiva distribution. There are RedHat employees, Debian contributors, committers on various projects, and so on. Lua, the programming language, comes from Brazil. There’s a practical advantage in being able to, say, tune a distribution for a particular purpose (e.g., the distribution being delivered to public schools). But beyond that it’s inspiring to finally be able to work with talented people in cool projects and have a chance to participate, rather than be handed down a proprietary product built abroad over which you have zero control. People are excited about and grateful for this. By the time you mix up these elements nearly all talented CS students and alpha geeks are well into the Linux camp. Unlike the US, the dynamic economy isn’t there to add some fragmentation. When these people go on to make technology choices in government or industry, guess what they’ll pick?

Reminds me, I must brush up my Portuguese.

Ohloh Opens Up

On Open Enterprise blog.

My Kind of (Meta)Place

I'd noted the growing excitement around Raph Koster's new company, Areae, but even I was surprised by the scope of the vision his recently-revealed Metaplace displays:

Our motto is: build anything, play everything, from anywhere. Until now, virtual worlds have all worked like the closed online services from before the internet took off. They had custom clients talking to custom servers, and users couldn't do much of anything to change their experience. We're out to change all of that.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

And to do this, Koster is building on openness:

we also committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol - anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea - no "not invented here," no closed proprietary approaches.

The consequences of adopting this approach sound amazing:

We speak Web fluently. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player -- whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data... you get the idea.

So I wasn't completely wrong when I wrote that his new project "sounds like a system of interconnected, perhaps standalone virtual worlds to me" - I just underestimated Koster's ambition.... (Via GigaOM.)