Stallman Convinces Cuba to Switch to Open Source

prostoalex writes "It's a big victory for Richard Stallman in North America, as Cuba decided to adopt open source software on the national level. Both Cuba and Venezuela are currently working on switching the entire government infrastructure to GNU/Linux operating system and applications, the Associated Press reports from Havana: 'Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.' The AP article doesn't mention the distro used for government workers, but says that the students are working on a Gentoo-based distro."

Re:Can we get another spokesman?

[xoundmind]

Like many others - including yourself - the whole Gates/"OSS is Communist" came to mind. But seriously, do you really think this is going to prevent you Aunt in Davenport, Iowa from switch to the Fedora Core? She was just about to, right?

The damn communists ruin everything.

Re:Since when was Cuba in 'North America'?

[jas79]

wikipedia seems to disagree with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_America/ [wikipedia.org]

Since the Triassic Period

[tverbeek]

Cuba is part of the North American continental plate, in much the same way that Great Britain and Ireland are in Europe, Japan is in Asia, Madagascar is in Africa, and the Falklinds are in South America. (In case you're wondering, the Caribbean plate lies immediately south of Cuba.)

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum, it seems you don't know anything about Venezuela at all...

Only one of your assumptions about Chavez is right. That he is an all around jackass. He didn't nationalize any industry, he, along with other latin-american leaders, are nationalizing resources, as my country did with oil in the 50s. He doesn't control the media at all, he has control of the state tv, but all other major private television and media groups are a strong opposition, and makes an open campaign against Chavez. He didn't arrest any political opponents, not even those that couped him in 2002 (with the help of the media), they are free and still plotting against Chavez instead of trying to beat him through elections.

Anyway, it's interesting to see Free Software and OSS supporters being averse at Socialist countries, one democratic, other not so (still more democratic than mine), when the concept of OSS and Free Software are very close to the Socialist ideology after all.

Re:Communists and Stallman

[beermad]

Hitler wasn't a vegetarian. His doctor had to prescribe laying off the meat to deal with some health problems he had.

He was however, a catholic. Something which led directly to the Holocaust. To quote from Mein Kampf, "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

Re:Communism

[amliebsch]

whats so terrible wrong about that?

I think you're trolling, because the very Wikipedia article you pasted links you directly to the practical [wikipedia.org] and theroetcial [wikipedia.org] horrors of communism.

Investigate before posting

[vbraca]

If you have tried to investigate the copyrighted AP story you've rewritten at Slashdot you would discover many more interesting facts on the subject. First of all beside proclaiming it's intention to switch to FOSS (since MS and other proprietry sw vendors are blocking their access to security patches based on IP addresses they use) Cuban government sites are mostly optimized for IE6 and 800x600 resolution and government agencies and ministries are still using MS as their OS of preference. In 2002. Castro himself founded "la Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas" (University of Information Sciences) or UCI - a very secretive facility that still doesn't have a properly functioning website (sic!). It is UCI, with it's "claimed" 10,000 students and 5,000 teaching staff, which stands behind Cuban efforts to build their own Linux distro (Novalinx) based on Gentoo as well as behind Castro's vision of Cuba as free software player on a global scale. Furthermore, Stallman's lecture, titled "El movimiento del Software Libre y el sistema operativo GNU/Linux", was part of an 3rd International Workshop on Open Source Software held as part of an Havana expo called "Informatica 2007." [informaticahabana.com] as well as 14 other International conferences. First hand experience from Marc Eisenstadt's [open.ac.uk] who was present at the lecture. As you can see there is much more behind "Stallman's win" than just extracting parts of the original AP story, in light of the fact that even FOSS oriented UCI students are mostly using pirated copies of MS Windows his win in Cuba is even more questionable. Not to mention that for ordinary Cuban's owning a computer is illegal as well as any form of internet usage outside "official" channels.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[dfghjk]

You apparently don't know what FUD is.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[BBPursell]

Have you even read the news in the last few months? Maybe you missed the articles about Chavez revoking broadcast licenses of the private media, or the articles about nationalizing "strategic" sectors of Venezuela's economy, including such crucial things as supermarkets (in other words, almost everything that he can get his hands on). Or you just happened to miss him kicking private media out of the election process last year.

Re:Since the Triassic Period

[0racle]

You're wrong on 2 counts. First, even if you wanted to define North America along political lines, there are more then 2 countries included in North America. Hint: NAFTA includes 3 countries. Second, South America starts south of Panama. In the area called the western hemisphere, there are 3 (major) tectonic plates, South American, North American and Caribbean and 4 descriptive areas, North America, South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Cuba is on the North American plate and in the Caribbean ocean. It would ether be described as North American or Caribbean, usually the latter. South American however is just plain wrong.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of like how the sitting US president attaches "signing statements" to every new law [boston.com]. If you want to play games about how much or how little a country is a dictatorship, it can apply well to the United States.

Re:An Old Canard . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know the meaning of socialism?

Regardless of what the dictionary says, I was a socialist for many years. I lived in Brixton, London in the 1980s, I spent time in Highbury/Islington where we flew the red flag on top of the town hall. I've read nearly all of Marx and Ingles. I subscribed to radio Moscow at the time and ran fund raisers for Ken Livingston and the GLC. I grew up in England and was a member of the SWP.

The GPL is *not* socialism.

Correction

[wass]

A correction regarding citizenship granted to Cuban refugees. On another forum someone mentioned that they're actually granted a green card immediately, not citizenship, and still have to do some other residency requirements before full citizenship. However - the hoops to jump through and time requirements for a Cuban refugee to become citizen are much easier than someone from Mexico, for example. And that immediate green card offering of course is a huge benefit, lets Cubans work freely without being exploited, unlike other immigrants.

Re:'almost dictatorial' ?

[dbIII]

Be serious. He has less to answer for than Condi Rice (extraordinary redition in her previous job - the CIA is making it clear they had orders and are not a rogue agency), Dick Cheney and others. There are a lot of nasty people at the top of a lot of regimes but you still have to deal with them.

Re:What victory?

[thedbp]

You missed the point entirely.

I don't care if your government is democratic, communist, fascist, socialist, or a monarchy - running a modern government requires an assload of elements, systems, and processes to be in sync and dependable.

The ideology has nothing to do with it - the issue is that a complete government switch is taking place, and just because you disagree with the politics has nothing to do with the fact that if linux is suited to run these governments, chances are its well-suited to run many other governments.

Of course, the anarchists would have to do something like switch to an abacus or whatever.

Re:Investigate before posting

[StevenBedrick]

I was actually at this conference, and saw Stallman's talk (as well as Marc Eisenstadt's- great talk, Marc!). I also spent a great deal of time chatting with UCI students. A couple of points:

First, Stallman didn't have to "convince" anybody of anything, in spite of the OP's title. The Cuban government has been using Linux--- sorry, Richard, GNU/Linux--- in various aspects of its IT infrastructure for quite some time. That said, nearly all workstations are running some variety of Windows. For a lot of reasons (including the embargo, but as with everything in Cuba, it's more complicated than that...), most of the computers in actual use by government employees are on the older side, and as is common in the developing world large monitors are rare. Hence the 800x600 standard.

Everybody I talked to, including relatively highly-placed government officials, was quite open about the fact that essentially every single copy of Windows in Cuba is pirated. I saw an awful lot of copies of Windows Vista UE being used, which I found very interesting given how little time it's been "in the wild". All the Linux machines that I saw--- and I saw quite a few--- were running some variant of Ubuntu.

The national health IT infrastructure (Infomed, for those familiar with the topic) is built with Plone running on, I believe, Debian. All of the students I met from the UCI were big-time Linux proponents.

I don't know how accurate the UCI's claim of having 10,000 students is, but there were an awful lot of them running around, and the campus is huge. The ones I talked to were pretty adamant about that 10,000 number, but as an outsider I really can't say one way or another whether they were correct or just feeding me the party line. From what I was able to tell (by talking to a ton of different people in different roles in the system), the UCI students have some approximation of full, open internet access, but only at the university- not in their homes or dorm rooms. It's still generally illegal for Cubans to have computers in their homes, much less internet access. Certain professionals and government employees are granted the privilege, but it is very tightly regulated. The students, however, seemed to be taking full advantage of their open university access. They all had Gmail accounts, and were using Google Talk. From what I saw, their IM conversations were just as inane as any college students' IM conversations would be- mostly discussion about weekend plans and attractive members of the relevant sex.

This leads me to another general observation I made--- the gender balance in IT in Cuba is far closer to being 50/50 than it is here in the states. For all of its (many) faults, I have to give Cuba credit on this one- they've done a bang-up job of removing gender-related obstacles in the professional classes. I was there for the medical informatics subconference, which meant that I spent a lot of time talking to doctors as well as to programmers, and in both cases there were just as many women as men. At equivalent tech conferences in the States, there are usually far fewer women running around than men.

I actually just flew back tonight, and it's really late, so I'll leave it off here. If anybody wants more info about this conference, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to ramble on some more after I've gotten some sleep. :-)