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.