BRAZIL SAMBAS WITH LINUX– Muito legal
	by Bill Weinberg,  Strategy Director at MontaVista Software

I just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the land of the Orixás, samba, and South American Open Source: Brasil. While the holidays and New Year celebrations in Brazil are distinctly better for barzinhos and the beach than business, I did get pulled into a pervasive palaver here and there.

First of all, I had the pleasure of discovering that not only are a new generation of consumer and wireless devices getting designed and built, but that many of the national and multi-national manufacturers are betting on Linux for their next projects. Given the harsh economic realities that rule in the region, it might seem odd that serious pervasive players are ready to bet their reais on software livre. The obvious rationale is unit cost: manufacturers of televisions, stereos, DVD players, set-top boxes, and other newly connected devices cannot afford paying royalties to Redmond or to RTOS vendors.

The less obvious motivator, as pointed out to me by Sandro Nunes, president of Latin Linux giant Conectiva, is the hidden cost of fiscalização – dealing with the software police. China, India, Mexico and other developing countries appear in the press as targets for both Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Both of these venerable U.S. entities regularly attempt to exert serious pressure on nations like these to “crack down” on software piracy in all forms.

While Brazil’s giant software marketplace still looms large in the legal imagination as a haven for pirates, the Brazilian government is actually taking draconian action against illegal copying and other violations. The Lei de Software (Number 9,609, 19 February 1998) stipulates penalties of up to three thousand times software list price accompanied by jail time of up to four years!

Software licensing, like all aspects of business in Brazil, is policed by hard-working public servants called fiscais (pl. of fiscal). While not exactly your jack-booted government enforcer, a fiscal can make your life reasonably unpleasant and always more expensive. Often this comes in the form of fines and taxes, but equally unpleasant are the “special” assessments (mordidas).

Serious software users in Brazil – banks, trading houses, universities, the government itself, and up-and-coming pervasive application developers, are tired of dealing with fiscalização informally. At the same time, they recognize that it is extremely hard, and expensive, to police and stamp out software copying by employees. In order to comply with U.S. and Microsoft-inspired edicts from Brasilia, these regulation-wary organizations are running towards Linux like so many cariocas to the sambadrome on Fat Tuesday of carnival.

Nunes of Conectiva cites a slew of wins to back up this thesis: a recent tender for 290,000 educational workstations and servers, wrapped up by Microsoft in October of 2001, closed in December with Linux and VMware; the Brazilian Navy will completely standardize on Linux by 2003 for over 30,000 land and sea-based systems; giant Banco do Brasil has completely switched to Linux servers; and city governments in Recife, Campinas, São Carlos, and elsewhere have not only dropped Microsoft but mandated the use of Linux. All to save precious funds, increase efficiency, and to say goodbye to the software fiscais. Tchau tchau!

Conectiva’s marketing reflects this unintended side effect of licensing zeal. At least once a week I wear their stylish black tee, proclaiming in Portuguese Copie. Seja legal. Use Linux –  Be legal. Use Linux. In Brazilian slang, legal (pronounced lay gal) also means cool. Yeah. Muito legal.