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By ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press Writer
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil - Activists at a leftist gathering where Microsoft is
viewed as a corporate bogeyman urged developing nations Saturday to leap
into the information age with free open-source software.
In a packed warehouse where tens of thousands are attending the World Social
Forum, Grateful Dead lyricist John Barlow said poor nations can't solve
their problems unless they stop paying expensive software licensing fees.
Open source software includes programs that are not controlled by a single
company. The software can be developed by anyone, with few restrictions. The
best known such software is the Linux (news - web sites) operating system,
which can be downloaded free from the Internet.
"Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than
it spends on hunger," said Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a cyberspace civil liberties group.
Barlow said Brazil is trying to wean itself from Microsoft with a campaign
to persuade Brazilians to shift from costly Windows products to applications
that run on the Linux operating system.
Microsoft contends open-source software can be more expensive than Windows
programs when service costs are factored in.
How much people spend on Microsoft products is unclear because the company
often provides discounts when it senses it may lose business. However,
competition from open-source software has prompted Microsoft to offer those
discounts.
Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's administration says the
open-source policy makes sense for a developing country where a mere 10
percent of the 182 million people have computers at home, and where the
debt-laden government is the nation's biggest computer buyer.
China, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea (news - web sites) also are
pursuing open-source alternatives. In a partial response to the open-source
threat and to piracy, Microsoft last year launched stripped-down, cheap
versions of Windows in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Similar products
are on the way for India and Russia.
Joining Barlow on Saturday were Brazilian pop superstar Gilberto Gil, who is
Brazil's minister of culture, and Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law
professor and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization devoted
to sharing creative material online.
All the social forum's 800 computers are running on open-source software,
but the loosely organized event ran into an embarrassing glitch Saturday's
when two big screens betrayed the fact that the computer was running on
Windows, with the operating system's toolbar visible at the bottom of the
screens.
Lessig noticed and the computer was quickly disconnected and replaced with a
laptop running on open-source software.