Linux the Flavor of Choice in Brazil?

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Posted by DocGuy at 18:28 | Thursday, April 24. 2008

I was scanning my home page today and I noticed this:

aseigo: Deploying KDE to 52 million young

The above link is a blog post pointing out the impact of this:

Open Source Diary: ProInfo and Linux Educacional - KDE in Public Schools in Brazil

Basically, KDE Linux will be distributed for free to "53,000 labs serving some 52,000,000 students" in the public educational system of Brazil. These posts contain links to the actual project including the proposed software offerings and screenshots of the very clean desktop interface.

I was immediately struck by how ground-breaking this is, then I started thinking about Microsoft. For a company that earns about a gillian in revenue each year, they really haven't stepped up to the plate when it comes to education. I mean they may offer student discounts or some similar middle ground capitulation, but certainly no free hand-outs!

Who stepped up to the plate?? The open source community.

What does this mean for the open source community? More importantly, what does this mean for Microsoft? With the open source movement gaining steam at an exponential pace, how much heat (if any) is Microsoft feeling from it. One thing is for sure, you won't see Microsoft bundled on any lab systems in Brazilian schools any time soon!!

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It's true that Microsoft doesn't donate computers to educational institutions. This is because of a combination of things.

First, Microsoft is not allowed to donate Windows PCs to educational institutions. Here's an example of some typical litation about this:

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/quotes/Chicago_Tribune_January_12_2002.htm

Second, Microsoft isn't going to donate anything other than Windows PCs.

#1 fred.bertsch on 2008-04-25 10:48

There are a couple fundamental problems with the link that you posted.

1. Microsoft was attempting to negotiate this as part of a settlement of their huge class-action antitrust law suit. So, this was in no way an attempt to prop up the educational system through donation.

2. This was in 2002. What have they done for education lately? Nothing because they didn't stand to profit from it as pointed out by #1 above.

Regarding your second point:

Obviously they wouldn't be distributing Macs running Leopard. But again, a company that generates gobs of revenue every year and an R&D budget through the roof, you think they could have spent a tiny bit of that money to come up with low cost solution aimed at the third-world education market?

Apparently not. How bad does it look for Microsoft that the open source community was able to address it in a big way?

#2 DocGuy on 2008-04-25 11:58

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