1. During the digital inclusion work the choice of applications and operation systems that are translated to the native language of the users, and has local communities giving support to them is very important . I would like to start this interview with you talking a little bit about the beginning of BrOffice and how the project is important to Brazil.

The project started in 2001, when I contacted the international community of OpenOffice.org and in 2002, we started to effectively work in translation and to build the Brazilian community as a whole, always with volunteer work. At the beginning we called it “OpenOffice.org.br”, with the goal to have the work produced by “our people to our people”. ;-)

About the importance of the project to Brazil, just think that in a country like ours, which is seeking to improve itself in all aspects (like any other developing country), has two options, when you think of usual office software to any type of computer user, one option is to buy the M$ Office, here it costs R$1500 (U$1k), or to go to illegality, by buying a cd that costs R$10 (U$4).

In the first case, I am talking about the price of the license *per machine*, but it becomes an absurd when we compare it with practical matters, like how much this means in soy or orange, products that generates jobs, income and currency to the country. To have an idea., 1 copy of (M$) Office costs the equivalent to 2 tons of soy*, or worst, to 7 tons of oranges*, approximately. However, these products generates how many jobs?! And how many families are feed with these jobs?! At this first analyzes we see that solutions like BrOffice.org are fundamental to Brazil.

Besides this social-economic matter, we have the technology aspect which is to migrate to a document format that can guarantee the freedom of the user, like the ODF, a standard open formate for files, recognized by ISO and, recently, by ABNT. In practice, what I am saying is that when you build a text in a text editor and are able to save it in another format besides .doc (or .docx to the new versions) where you will sure that the document will *only* look good in the proprietary software that runs this format. In BrOffice.org case, the files can be saved in the ODF format which, if you want to change your tool (software) in the future, you will have the option to choose between over 30 different suppliers (of tools for offices/suite office tools) and for sure you will be able to open all your documents.

* font: http://www.cepea.esalq.usp.br

2. How the idea to create material for digital inclusion happen? How is the reach of it, do you have any idea of the number of people who are using it? Is it available for download on the internet? What are the other distribution methods of this material?

Social issues are one of the preocupations and prerogative of the open source community, and it wouldn’t be different with us. The difference is that besides building the digital inclusion material[1], we are also developing together with the users of BrOffice.org communities, the Gubros[2], volunteer work together with the telecentros (free public computer labs) and other activities that brings together the idea of inclusion of those communities who needs this.

[1]http://www.broffice.org/broo/?q=infobasica
[2]http://www.broffice.org/gubro

3. What is the BrOffice vision when we talk about ‘Digital Inclusion’?

We see it in two fases: sharing knowledge and organizing the society to help on this work.

On the sharing knowledge phase, this happens in many ways. Besides the creation of a didactic material as we mentioned it before, we also organize materials developed by dozens of volunteers from Brazil and around the world, many times translating them, making them available in or portal so people can have in a single place the principal tool of productivity - the office tool (text, spreadsheets, presentations, and others), material to study how to use and take better advantage of this tool, and to have in their disposition a collection of models and documents that are useful on day-to-day activities, which is the case of ‘Escritório Aberto’(Open Office in Portuguese)[3].

[3]http://www.broffice.org/escritorio_aberto

On the organizing the society phase, we have the preoccupation to touch local groups to become working groups (in Portuguese ‘Grupos de Trabalhos’ or GTs) who look for volunteers to develop activities in the telecentros of their state. Is a new project, we started it this year, but promising.

4. What are the partnership of BrOffice with the Brazilian government? Can you talk a little about your work with the Ministery of Education and digital inclusion projects of the government - Casa Brasil for instance?

In reality there are no partnerships, only the necessity of a product and the low cost option which is BrOffice.org. We are worried, as the same way as the international project, to present a product even better and fits in as better as possible for our user.

Here, I should point out about the difference of the name in Brazil in relation to the other countries around the world. The brand “Open Office” is register by a company way before there was the OpenOffice.org project,showing that was no bad faith in it. However, feeling violated, it started a process to defend it’s brand, since it is their right to do so. To avoid juridic problems to our developers and users, we register the brand BrOffice.org and we discussed about it in the international project level. Therefore, BrOffice.org *Is* the Brazilian community of OpenOffice.org as well as the product in pt-BR. This can be confirmed with the international project as well[4].

Thus, in our work on improvements, besides the work in the code, dictionaries, and other improvements, we also try to integrate with the Linux distributions, because for this public, the installation is done via their own repositories. Which was the case with the Debian[5] distribution which understood the problem with Brazil and today they offer BrOffice.org straight from their repositories. The same understanding isn’t shared by the commercial Linux distributions.

[4]http://br-pt.openoffice.org
[5]http://www.debian.org

Despite all this the project has evolved, always with voluntary work and the support of institutions like Celepar, state company from Paraná. Partnerships with the Ministry of Education and the Casa Brasil project, as in the raising of resources as with services to the NGO BrOffice.org could increase exponentially the product development, generate jobs inside the community, establishment and expansion of knowledge (know-how) in the country, not to mention things like fighting digital exclusion and evasion of foreign exchange in the country.