Continuing our series of bringing information about the free software movement in Latin America to English readers, North by South interviewed Cláudio Filho (original in Portuguese), one of the people responsible for starting the OpenOffice.org project in Brazil (pt-BR), known in the country as BrOffice.org. The project started around 2002 and the community in Brazil who supports it has done some great work not only to provide a high-quality office suite to Brazil’s citizens but to also do their part on the nation-wide movement for digital inclusion and promoting free software.

To get a picture of how seriously this project is taken in Brazil, take a look at these quotes from the ‘Official Journal’ (where all the activities of the government, i.e. laws, plenaries, resolutions, auctions etc, are recorded). These quotes are from the federal High Council of Labour Justice and the Superior Court of Work:

“Art. 1º Gives preference to open source programs free of reservations of right owners, as the conditions of its use, modification, full use, access to source code, distribution, customization and, crucially, without cost of acquiring licenses.”

Following this new requirement of the High Council, they continue:

“Art. 4º It is defined as a pattern of use in the bodies of Justice Labour the office suites “BrOffice complying with the provisions of art. 3, I and II of this Act.”

This is affirmed in practice by articles on BrOffice’s website, describing how the Digital Program of Paraná State has installed 40,000 copies of BrOffice.org at 2,000 state schools, which is 95.24% of the schools of in the state of Paraná. Another impressive number is that the House of Representatives of Brazil saved R$5 Million (USD$3 Million) by adopting BrOffice.org as their office suite.