Gilberto Gil is one of Brazil’s most famous musicians, and his experiences reflect that of Brazil as a whole. A gifted musician, he was arrested by the US-supported military dictatorship in Brazil in 1969. After his release, he went into exile in London. Almost four decades later, Brazil has seen their stifling and brutal dictatorship collapse and be replaced by one of the largest and most complex democracies in the western hemisphere. Brazil is no longer led by right-wing military generals but instead by the far left-wing Workers Party and that party’s progressive policies are leading the rest of the world in regards to open source software and universal digital access. And, Gilberto Gil is no longer an exiled dissident but Brazil’s Minister of Culture. He was recently at the southbysouthwest conference in Austin, Texas to promote open source copyright licenses like Creative Commons, creater-owned distribution networks and universal access. Read more here.

For developing countries and emerging markets, it has long been accepted practice to pirate Microsoft products even within government organizations and mid- to large-sized businesses. While Microsoft has a grand anti-piracy public stance, it has been suspected that they accept some level of piracy in order to keep people using their platform, as well as hold a form of leverage against their clients. Recently, the president of Microsoft’s business division, Jeff Raikes, has admitted as much. In an interview he gave at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference last week, Raikes said:

“Our number one goal is that we want people to use our product. If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else. And that’s because we understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the install base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do is over time you hope to convert them to licensing the software, legally licensing it, so on, and so forth…”

Raikes specifically mentions China and Brazil, two markets which are swiftly making an overall move to open source software. You can read the full story here.

The European Commission’s largest open source initiative to date was announced today in the form of QualiPSo, a 20-member alliance of major IT players from China, Brazil and Europe, intended to accelerate the adoption of open source technologies. The underlying goal of the group is to build confidence in the IT industry for open source tech. You can read their press release here.

From the right, the Conservative Party has blasted Tony Blair for not incorporating open source technology into their overall IT strategy. Conservative member of Parliament and the current Shadow Chancellor has been publicly focusing on the complete lack of open source adoption by the UK government:

[Osborne] condemned the “litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget,” and said: “It’s clear that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered.” The shadow chancellor went on to applaud “software that’s developed collectively”, and criticised the government’s strategy of sticking to the major vendors. The result is that “unlike traditional proprietary software, users can access the source code, making it possible for them to tailor the software to their needs and make constant iterative improvements”.

The full article can be read here.

This article in Business News Americas suggests that Red Hat’s opening of three offices in Latin America this past year is a symptom of an overall situation where Latin American companies are poised to shift to open source en masse. They cite figures which indicate a significant interest in a mass movement to free software:

“In Latin America, 60% of companies are evaluating whether to implement or expand Linux systems in servers, Mexican paper El Universal reported, citing information from US tech consultancy IDC. At the same time, 40% of Latin American companies are interested in implementing Linux open source systems in workstations.”