MIT Urges Brazilian Government to Use Linux

sebFlyte writes "MIT's Media Lab has written to the Brazillian government (who is looking into a method to get its citizens cheap, high quality PCs) and has urged them to use Linux. From the article: 'Free software is far better on the dimensions of cost, power and quality...if the source code is proprietary, it is hidden from the general population. This robs them of a tremendous source for learning.'"

UK Gov...

[Zebadias]

Here in the UK the waste of money in the public sector on MS and other software licences is huge! If only we took such a forward thinking approch.

Re:just a thought

[melonman]

But for 99.99% of computer users, it's academic whatever the OS. I've been running a Linux cybercafe for 3.5 years, and in that time I reckon we've had maybe 3 people through the door who might have been able to fiddle with our OS without having to reinstall afterwards (if I had let them). Indeed, if we're talking about kernel-level fiddling, what percentage of /.ers routinely take their patches to bits to see how they work?

If I hack a piece of proprietary code, assuming I have the means to do so, I invalidate my warranty and might get sued. If I hack a piece of OSS, I won't get sued, but I probably still invalidate the equivalent of my warranty - it's usually called "forking".

A real example, admittedly a long way from kernels. One of our customers was a long-time user of a proprietary forum package, written in Perl. When we took over hosting his site, we had a look at the code, and found some enormous security problems, which we fixed, which of course meant that we then couldn't run the usual upgrade procedures. Said customer has now moved his site over to phpBB. We found one or two problems with that, fixed them, and, hey presto, we have identical issues as soon as we want to install a "mod" or any of the official patches. The only difference is that we're legally stuffed rather than illegally stuffed :) (Much as it pains me to say this, phpBB is a much better bit of code than the perl thing they had before, and support is far better, so we've won on the exchange, but if you want off-the-shelf fixes you're still better off not touching the code yourself).

Indeed

[hey!]

Not when there's Multics. You could probably emulate the Multics hardware on a pic these days.

I mean, if you need proof the Multics is the way to go, consider this: Multics is the only operating system in which the path separator makes sense. The file C in the subdirectory B of directory A is called "A>B>C", not "A/B/C", nor yet "A\B\C".

Not only does thie capture the intuitive "whole is greater than the parts" idea, it also frees up "/" for use in file names (e.g. "January/Feburary_Report.txt") and "\" for the use of non printing characters (e.g. "This_Is_A_Weird_Filename\007!").

Re:Schools

[indifferent children]

I support the monoculture...the Linux monoculture. Having the same OS on your: PDA, desktop, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers means massive savings in support, development, training, etc.

There will be some diversity between distros in Linux (exactly as much diversity as the most dissatisfied developer desires), but the push for a Linux Standard Base is a move toward monoculture inside the Linux community (for the benefits that I stated above).

The harm isn't from the monoculture, it's from the monopoly. And let's face it, how many OSes do you think Starfleet wants to maintain?

Re:Sounds superfluous

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

> But is it POSIX? The government shouldn't be in
> the business of dictating implementations, but
> interfaces. Links?

No POSIX, sorry. In fact, my microprocessor will probably never even have a C compiler for it so this wouldn't make much of a difference anyway. But it is not possible to make a really modern OS if you demand POSIX compatibility - you will just end up with a Unix with a very odd (and irrelevant) kernel or exo-kernel or whatever.

Compatibility with the Internet standard can get you pretty far these days, no matter what your computer looks like on the inside.

My company's link is included in the header of all my posts, right? But though even more outdated, my pages from the 1990s [lsi.usp.br] were better organized. Yuck - the main page is trashed :-(