https://www2.bancobrasil.com.br/aapf/login.jsp?url=relacionamento/mcib.jsp

Site doesn't work in the latest opera. Works in the latest FF if you delete the default iceTea jvm and "ln" the latest jdk.

"The Bank of Brazil has branches and offices all over Brazil, which is a very large country. The mass migration happened in 2006, before the migration really began in Munich. "

As an American expatriate, living in Brazil, who has a bank account at the Bank of Brazil, and until recently worked for the Brazilian government doing everything from linux embedded to java, lets not get carried away. The ATM's all run OS/2 from what I've seen. Their online site uses java security which ironically often breaks both opera and firefox access for linux users - if you call their support they will tell you they don't support linux.

And imho don't trust any numbers you see from the Brazilian government - any mandates are ignored at will. Their is lots of open source in the government, but its used in pragmatic way, not because its required.

As an American programmer who has successfully emigrated to Brazil, I have two pieces of advice:

1) Marry a local in your destination choice. Your spouse will teach you the local language. That will solve most paperwork issues.

2) If you decide on a country with a weaker curreny, start your own company focused on international clients. You will be competitively priced in your clients country, and the foreign currency will convert favorably. Be prepared to wait a while until you have clients. You might be able to find local work until then.

Neither of those two is easy or right for everybody, but moving to another country isn't for everyone either.

As for Brazil, imho the government tries as hard as they can to ignore you, and complaining to the government is part of the culture so you can do it as much as you like.

Uh, with the limited developer resources openmoko has always had, spending a year on a cancelled project is clearly poor management. Releasing the Freerunner with broken hardware is also poor management. I'd feel better about openmoko's chances as a company if they fired the management instead of all the developers. That never happens though - which is often why companies fail.

Leonardo da Vinci sketched a car, and Karl benz according to the US patent office did more than any person to make it a reality, yet neither got the credit. Openmoko I think will be like that - computers are getting smaller, netbooks are the rage, projects like openPandora are pushing opensource hardware to its current limits, ie, the timing is right.

Its only a matter of time before decent management and funding will make an opensource phone happen. Maybe Android is it, but its just too much java imho to get the outside developer attention needed to make an embedded platform grow.

What I think is obvious to most of the people involved with openmoko is that they have had bad management, which will kill any project. They were always understaffed, and they spent a year on a canceled project. The fact that they pretend that their developers leaving is not a problem reminds me of several other experiences first hand - and none of those companies are here today.

Openmoko is now earily similair to a zombie company - keeps blowing sunshine while its developers quits or gets fired in droves, they stop building products, the only ones left are in marketing, and they linger on without doing much. The facts are:

1) The 10,000 phones are mostly of the 900mhz variety, which has a "buzz" issue that makes the phone unusable. You need to go to a "buzz fix" party to do a non-trivial hardware mod. The "A7" version that fixes these issues is in perpetual delay, with no release date in site.

2) The only two paid kernel developers have left this last month or have announced they are leaving, some key hardware guys have left in the last two months. Some key UI people have left over the last 6-8 months.

3) They've abandoned the next model, the GT03, and they have publicly stated no 3G without a guaranteed sales of 50,000 units.

I like the idea of Free software on mostly open hardware - only they can't for whatever reason get the hardware part right. I think the software is not the problem, its the hardware. The Freerunner has been described as a Porsche body with a lawnmower engine, and looking at openPandora, I scratch my head and wonder why its like that.

IMHO its like any project that is going down the tubes - far too few developers on a project changing scope too often.

Hardware's not easy - I damn near went insane from the politics of embedded linux projects myself - but I can't imagine working with a constantly changing hardware scope while everyone is leaving. I'd be pleasantly surprised if openmoko makes a comeback at this point - the first problem is I wonder how they could attract talent in the future, even if they could afford it.