Free Software in Brazil:
Analysis & Interview with Marcos Mazoni

by Ryan & Isabela Bagueros, May 5 2008, San Francisco, California
Read in English: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4
Leia em Português: Página 1, Página 2, Página 3, Página 4

(continued from page one)

Practical Contributions from Brazil's Free Software Development

In the area that Mr Mazoni has worked in, the state-owned IT firms, much of the contribution that has happened is in the form of software development and introducing the paradigm of free software into the management culture of these firms. Out of this experience comes a number of free software programs which are available for download from the IT firms which built them.

Mr Mazoni: "We have public companies in the IT area, on the state and federal level, with a lot of technical capacity, we have top professionals who, when they are exposed to free software technology, get very excited about the possibility of doing real computing. This is a steadily-growing example that evolved in Brazil in the past ten years. There are still things missing but every time we progress, we are effectively changing the baseline. It's the question of not having to develop everything. I have to work with the analysis of solutions that exist and keep cooperating with these communities."

"The production process is completely different, because it comes from a different mental model. The model of proprietary software gave us the logic of comparison. One product does one thing, another product does something else, I'm going to see which one I need more, or which one is closer to what I need. In the free software world, we have to depart from this model. I'm not going to compare how much one does or what the other has to do. To choose the product I'm going to put in my network, I'm going to see which one more fits my needs and I'll also find myself as an active element in the construction of the product, returning these changes to the community as well. So, we focus on more than just technological metrics, sometimes it isn't about which product does more. This difference -- of creating things together, sharing and non-competition is the big change that comes with the free software philosophy."

"So when we look at some of the experiences in Brazil of building office systems, email, scheduling, directories ... those are based on free software technologies. We had 'Direto' from PROCERGS, 'Carteiro' from SERPRO. But we work with 'Expresso' from CELEPAR because 'Expresso' is a groupware that's in a process of evolution, so more people are working on it, in a much more productive environment, and even more, we'll have new things happening with the product that we couldn't have thought of alone. So, we have people that haven't been working together with us on this solution, from the community, working on it and building solutions that we haven't even thought of yet."

"So this change has certainly put 'Expresso' into a big evolution in Brazil, especially in the public sector, but not exclusively. Because we also started to introduce the thought that cooperation is the best thing in the free software world. It's not the matter of the technnology itself, but the co-operation, working together beyond the boundaries of my organization, and that I don't need to have the brand of my organization on every product. I have to have a good product that works, that has a permanent life cycle. This is the logic that free software shows us as a great organizational innovation."

Expresso is a groupware application that was developed on top of PHPGroupware by CELEPAR and the government of the state of Parana. It adds a number of innovations to the original software, including an AJAX/Javascript front-end. Anyone can download this software from CELEPAR's website, in addition to a number of other programs⁵, including an urban planning application⁶!

This incorporation of the free software process into the planning and management of some of Brazil's largest IT companies (which also serve the public as state-owned entities that work on public projects) is not only providing code contributions but is spreading the concept of free software development methodologies to a vast number of people.

Next: Resistance to the free software movement in Brazil >>

Footnotes

home : about us : contact us : open source tech : news

© 2006 - 2008 North-by-South LLC.