There is an excellent article at Costa Rica Pages which talks about the challenges this small, Latin American country faces. Costa Rica only has a population of 4 million people and software piracy is a rampant problem there. Their vice-president, Laura Chinchilla, has said that “if the government legalized all its software licenses, we would have no funds left to build public housing or finance public education.” It is estimated that software companies lose $27 million from piracy in Costa Rica. The suggested response in this article is that Costa Rica should join other Latin American countries in a complete migration to free software. Towards that end, a free software installation festival is being held this weekend at the Universidad de Costa Rica. While the government may be slow to make this change, the population is starting to embrace free software as a legal alternative to proprietary software. Our hats off to the free software pioneers showing their country the way this weekend! :)

One of the great announcements made at FISL this year was that the Brazilian Ministry of Education is currently in the process of deploying 53,000 computer labs with all open source software and 52 million students will have access to these labs. The computers in the labs will be running a Linux distribution called Linux Educacional which is based on Debian and KDE as a desktop. By the end of this year, there will already by 29,000 of these labs open and available! Each lab contains a server and 15 terminals to use. Many of the slides from the presentation are online and translated to English. Doing some rough estimates, even if Microsoft gave a 50% educational discount, the cost of this project with Windows would be $79.5 million USD (around 100 million Reais, the Brazilian currency) before even one computer was made available because that would just be the licensing fees. A project like this enables one to see the scope of the benefits that open source provides — given the state of public schools in the United States, it is nearly a crime that almost every school district continues to pay our tax dollars to Microsoft.