It’s a salsa party for free software

SAO PAULO: Brazil's government said on Thursday it will train a thousand state workers to use freely available software as part of an effort to save more than 100 million reais ($34.3 million) in IT costs.

"One of the main objectives is to train people to spread knowledge to other federal public workers," said Carlos Ceconi, chief of Brazil's state-funded Institute of Information Technology's (ITI) office.

Foreign governments are increasingly encouraging their IT workers to adopt open source software, which can be copied and modified freely, unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows.

Brazil's ITI, the agency in charge of moving federal computers from proprietary software such as Office and Windows to alternatives such as Open Office and Linux, aims to boost the country's exports with locally developed software and rely less on software from abroad.

The training program will take place in late April and will consist of more than 100 courses, from basic usage to more complex tasks such as setting up secure networks.

The Brazilian government started last year to adopt an initiative to rely less on proprietary software, which charge license fees for each copy and can't be modified.

For example, Brazil's national Congress saved around 5 million reais, or 15 percent of its technology budget, in 2003 after adopting Open Office.

The data processing institute for national Social Security (Dataprev) also bought 3,000 computers with Open Office, said Ceconi, estimating that it saved around 400,000 reais last year.

Brazil's Health Ministry will also migrate 30 percent of its computers, spread in hospitals around the country, to free software like Linux this year, said an ITI official.

 © Reuters