The Brazilian federal government has launched a new version of their portal, offering more than 500 online services to Brazilian citizens, built entirely with free software. The new design and layout looks great and, in honor of the release, NXS is providing a translation of the press release about the launch. Translated from Portal Brasil: um novo conceito de comunicação (March 5, 2010) by North-by-South:

“The Brazil Portal marks a new stage in the communication from the State with society and the media,” declared the the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, during the launch of the new version of the www.brasil.gov.br website, held last Wednesday, the 3rd, by the Secretary of Communication for the Presidency - Secom.

According to Secom, the Portal was envisioned and developed to break with the current models of digital communication from the government. The proposed environment is to offer personalized content to diverse public interests, to gather in one space more than 500 services of electronic government and to promote interactivity between users and the State. “The Portal is a permanent work-in-progress and, therefore, open to everyone’s opinion,” the Secretary of Secom, Franklin Martins, said.

The Secretary emphasized the innovative design of the Brazil Portal and the importance of multimedia content. For him, this is an experience that treats information as a whole in the digital environment.

The form of navigation in the website is matched up with the user’s preference, since the Portal offers the organization of information by profile or themes. Workers, students, entrepreneurs and journalists get targeted content and Secom already plans for the creation of new profiles.

For the international version, the division is by focus of interest: investors, tourists and students. “We are radicalizing the experience of electronic government in Brazil,” said the Minister of Planning, Budgets and Management, Paulo Bernando.

Technology: The Brazil Portal is developed with Plone 3.1.7 and runs on Zope Application Server 2.10.6, programmed in Python 2.4.4. “The use of free platforms is the direction of the federal government. And the choice of the tools for the construction of the Portal would not be different. So, we chose Zope/Plone,” explained Silvia Sardinha, Director of the Internet and Events for Secom.

Cintia Cinquini, from the Presidency’s Department of Technology, said that Plone is a widely-used platform in the government to add distinctive features, such as usability (a multiuser platform with easy management), accessibility (standardized resources) and security.

The new Portal is hosted on servers at Serpro and counts on the support and experience of the company in the use of this software.

On January 25th, SourceForge.net published a post on their official blog explaining that they were denying SourceForge services and site access to users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited people from those countries from accessing their website but they only began enforcing the condition a week before posting the blog entry.

Part of their justification reads: “Our need to follow those laws supersedes any wishes we might have to make our community as inclusive as possible. The possible penalties for violating these restrictions include fines and imprisonment. Other hosting companies based in the US have similar legal and technical restrictions in place.”

Although, many users have posted comments criticizing SourceForge’s decision. Some, such as afsharm, who has contributed to projects hosted on SourceForge and can no longer access his work now: “I am an Iranian (an innocent one) and I am not responsible for what ever my government is doing. As nawwark mentioned I’ve sometimes have contributions in SF.NET projects, so why you are denying me from my own works? It’s against freedom and against FOSS.”

Others, like yemeth, could not understand how a project based in another country can be considered a US product: “I seriously can’t understand this. I’m Spanish, and my technology isn’t northamerican. It has nothing to do with the United States except that is hosted here. I can’t understand why said government has anything to say about my will to share my code with EVERYONE. I have no personal embargo against Cuba, nor does my country.”

And there were those, like pmarkiewicz, who pointed out the easier solution: “Folks, if you visit http://www.torproject.org and install tor, then SourceForge can not determine your country of origin. If you happen to traverse through an exit node that is not in an ‘axis of evil’ country, then there is no reason you would be denied that code. Senator Clinton even endorsed efforts to provide these tools to dissenters.”

The comment makes reference to Secretary of State Clinton’s request to Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance shutdown during the election protests in Iran, so that Iranian users could access and use the website (seemingly putting Twitter at legal risk, following the logic used by SourceForge). At the time, she said: “And it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter is a very important one, not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly to young people.”

Two weeks later, SourceForge posted another entry on their blog, announcing a change in their decision. Now, they have removed the block and added a feature that allows project owners to ban access to the sanctioned countries:

Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we’ve ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month’s change.

While this was a positive change in the eyes of some, there are still many unanswered questions from SF users, especially those from outside of the US. They don’t understand the US laws and are not sure if they will be in some kind of trouble by choosing to freely distribute their software.

To be fair, SourceForge.net is not the only web service to block users from the sanctioned countries. NXS News reported on this before when it was noticed that Google was blocking access to users based on the country they were surfing from. The consensus being floated around the FOSS community is to start choosing hosts outside the US for their projects, where restrictions on internet use are not so strict. A good option would be Launchpad.net in the UK, used by MySQL and Ubuntu. Either way, the US Government’s arguments about standing up for freedom (remember, “they hate us for our freedom”) is certainly diluted by their own efforts to restrict the individual freedom of people to freely use the internet, regardless of where in the world they happen to be when using it.

For a long time now, NXS has preached about the computer programmer demographic in Latin America. Our experience is that Latin America is filled with the “dream candidate” that companies are looking for in the US: someone who is a free software geek, has a passion for code, uses free software in their everyday life (meaning that their skill set is constantly being improved as part of day-to-day activities) and keeps up with all the latest trends and developments in the free software world.

A recent webinar by Evans Data has confirmed through research what we have known through experience. In a presentation entitled “Contrasting Software Development Trends Between the Emerging Markets and the Rest of the World,” Evans Data CEO John Andrews released their findings that 74% of developers in emerging markets use free software, where “use” is defined as “personal use or corporate use, and could include both developer tools and desktop or server applications.” That’s 11% higher than the rest of the world — and it’s a meaningful 11%. While software development jobs are growing worldwide, they are growing three times faster in emerging markets such as Latin America. The presentation is further analyzed in this post on IT World.

President Lula da Silva continues his insightful support for free software. Translation by NXS: “In the middle of a world dominated by competitiveness […] the free software community demonstrates that there is still space for the democratization of knowledge.” Lula made the remarks at CONSEGI 2009.

Lula spoke about the broader goals of free software to break down barriers in an increasingly information-based society. These goals are being pursued by using both the programs and values of free software. He continued: “We are discussing access to development. Our meeting is important for us to strengthen the necessary collaboration to become a factor in social inclusion. I feared that the social relationship would remain prejudiced but what I saw was children sitting around, talking amongst themselves, working on the computer, researching and teaching each other. A total interaction.”

How can these values be imported into the United States?

President Lula of Brazil is about to open the 2nd Annual CONSEGI Conference in Brazil — the International Free Software and Electronic Government Conference. For more information about CONSEGI, see NorthxSouth’s archives (NXS attended the historic first conference).