Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

TECHNOLOGY-VENEZUELA: Heading Towards Free Software

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 30 2004 (IPS) - Venezuela, following in Brazil’s footsteps, has joined the club of countries that are adopting and promoting free or open-source software, in a bid to save money, achieve technological independence, and strengthen alliances among countries of the developing South.

“We are working on a decree to make it official and obligatory in Venezuela to acquire and foment the use of free software in the public administration,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced in a recent forum on technology held in Caracas.

But government entities are not waiting for the presidential decree, and have already begun to migrate to open-source software programmes, which tend to be free of charge, unlike the proprietary operating systems sold by corporations like Microsoft and Unisys.

“The Education Ministry’s central database alone has saved 2.2 million dollars by adopting free software this year,” Carlos Joa, president of the Bolivarian Foundation of Information Technology and Telematics (FUNDABIT), the Ministry’s technological arm, told IPS.

The Education Ministry’s 2002-2007 plan contemplates the installation of 380,000 computers in 10,000 centres that will serve 23,000 primary schools with a combined total of eight million students.

At today’s prices “some 400 million dollars in hardware will be spent, and if we had to pay licensing fees for proprietary software on top of that, we would perhaps have to spend the same amount or even more on administrative and educational operating systems,” said Joa.

Last year, the Venezuelan government paid 7.5 million dollars in software licensing fees, and another 12.5 million for data processing, said former planning minister Felipe Pérez Martí.

It is not yet possible to estimate the savings that will be involved in moving to free software in a country like Venezuela, which has a population of 25 million and a gross domestic product (GDP) of just over 100 billion dollars.

But Brazil, a pioneer in Latin America in switching to free software, which has a population of nearly 180 million and a GDP five times that of Venezuela, could spend four billion dollars a year on software, Antonio Albuquerque with the Brazilian Communications Ministry said at the “first World Forum on Free Technology” held Nov. 17-20 in Caracas.

The decision by the government of left-leaning President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva in Brazil to make the move to open-source software throughout the public sector is based on economic considerations, as well as the search for technological autonomy and the aim of sharing knowledge.

Another reason is national security. The Lula administration argues that the government and armed forces in Brazil should not be reliant on the closed-source codes of proprietary software systems, which are hidden from the users, who therefore have no way of determining if there are “backdoors” vulnerable to attack by viruses and hackers.

Free software “can stimulate the development of technologies to share with Argentina, Chile, China, India and other nations of the South, creating a technological foundation for South-South trade and cooperation,” Albuquerque commented to IPS.

For his part, Pérez Martí, who heads the non-governmental organisation Conexión Libre in Venezuela, said “Technology is a tool for giving power to the people.”

“Free software is a way of producing and disseminating a public good – knowledge,” he added.

The movement is based on the concept that “any computer user has the right to copy and modify the software he or she is using,” Richard Stallman, considered the “founding father” of the free software movement in the United States, said at the Caracas forum.

“Governments are starting to get interested in the benefits,” Stallman, co-creator of the nonproprietary Linux/GNU operating system, told IPS. “Free software can help society leave behind eternal technological dependency and help set it free.”

“The United States wants that to be illegal, and is trying to get other countries to pass similar laws. That is why we owe a debt to Lula, who rejected that point in the FTAA (the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas),” he added.

Brazil has also clashed with the United States over the issue of free software in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) multilateral trade talks.

In May 2003, the local government in Munich, Germany’s third-largest city, became the first public administration of a major city to adopt free software. Since then, the migration to open-source systems, like the Linux operating system, the OpenOffice office productivity application suite, and the Mozilla browser, has continued apace in Europe.

Of course none of this pleases the large corporations vending proprietary software. At a recent meeting of Asian government leaders in Singapore, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warned that governments could face a slate of lawsuits if they used Linux instead of Windows, for example.

Linux violates more than 228 patents, said Ballmer, who added that “Some day, for all countries that are entering the WTO, somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property.”

Besides, he added, “We think our software is far more secure than open-source software. It is more secure because we stand behind it, we fixed it, because we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software.”

But governments that are moving to free software base that decision on other considerations. “Besides the cost advantage, there is the question of standardisation. We can create software adapted to our needs, without being tied to any specific brand, which makes it easier for us when it comes to a public tender for acquiring software,” said Joa.

On the other hand, “states and other users can modify the programmes as they wish. We don’t have to ask permission each time we want to adapt them, and that gives us an advantage for unifying our systems and databases around the country,” he added.

Eduardo Samán, with the governmental Intellectual Property Service of Venezuela, also believes that “the open-source system facilitates the creation of more software, with more engineers producing and generating added value. It is a democratisation process that runs counter to the raking in of profits by a single firm through proprietary software,” he told IPS.

Pérez Martí said Conexión Libre, in conjunction with ruling coalition legislators, will submit a bill on free information and software technology, “to foment production of software in the public administration and in Venezuela’s economic and social system.”

“Our slogan is ‘as much free software as possible,” he added.