It caused us strangeness news published a few days ago in the communication channels of various Federal Government agencies, related to Information Technology, calling for a celebratory event ten years of CACIC community, one of the free software solutions offered in public portal.
Still, this software is described in the portal as one of the pioneering projects, which has a community of more than forty thousand interested. According to the official description, “the current version is the result of development support given by Dataprev, Ministry of Planning, the Attorney General of Finance and members of the community”.
Projects like this are the result of more than one Investment decade of public money on free software (legally based only on ordinances and normative instructions)
The celebration in question only serves to again provoke an assessment of this policy:. who won with her outside the circle of stakeholders on the subject?
Since the dawn of the free software manifesto in 1984 in the United States, the technological promise of independence it has been touted as one of the benefits of free software. . However, after more than thirty years, no country in the world could fulfill this promise
If you look at the national reality, the picture is the least worrisome: the participation of the local information technology industry in the market continues to fall gradually, and the balance of payments generated by the use of technology in Brazil only grows.
The support for free software not only has not been able to change this picture, as it has proved to be a waste of public money, regarded as public policy: based on the Census of the IT sector, which reached 19 countries in 2014, we know that both the use of free software in Brazil as well as the adoption of corresponding model by companies to distribute their solutions is markedly lower than in developed countries is absolutely no public policy accordingly.
When building software using money and civil servants following this policy, the government withdrew specialized human resources of private enterprise to develop software products. Have you ever thought the complaint level if it were made with bread, cars, books or music?
So, instead of using government purchasing power as a form of investment to boost the local industry was made the option to increase the government’s current expenditure, with salaries.
If this money had been used to strengthen the local industry, would not be embittering, as other data of the IT Sector Census, the worst position as an exporter among all countries surveyed (in percentage of companies export), getting even below all other countries in Latin America
Finally, we find that this opportunity has been lost:. cloud computing, based on public and private data centers, where all providers not only their solutions interoperate with those of others, such as run on their own equipment, render superfluous any discussion of cost of licenses. Cloud computing is marketed as a service for all.
In this context, the free software is just one of the available technologies. And it certainly is not the technology that generated this innovation. Alias, the great free software projects have always been characterized for making ‘free’ existing technology:. This model is poor in its ability to generate disruptive innovation
Returning to the dissemination efforts of free software by the government, through the Public Software Portal, we ask: this freely accessible portal anywhere in the world, allows other countries to benefit from the Brazilian public money investment. We earn as parents in return that?
The continued lack of understanding of this issue by the federal government (and many other governments) is worrying. The auspicious news is that we have found understanding on this issue being expanded in Congress, a fundamental step to facilitate more appropriate public policies in Brazil.
Opposing these facts to the party that motivated us to return to the subject, funded by public money, there is still another question: besides the organizers, who participated in this celebration? After already a few weeks of the event, it has not even aired the number of participants.
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