What is going on in Brazil?

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daniel_reetz
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What is going on in Brazil?

Post by daniel_reetz »

Some of our coolest hacks and most interesting builds have come from Brazil... users like dbmoura show up out of nowhere and do excellent 3D modeling and documentation, and now this:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201110 ... rnet.shtml

I am really impressed with Brazil. Can anyone comment on the Open Source environment there, or living in Brazil in general? Many times in my life, I have been tempted to move to other countries to get certain work done. Brazil is looking more and more like the place to do interesting work.
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scann
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Re: What is going on in Brazil?

Post by scann »

Dan, I'm not from Brasil but I can tell you something about there, since I have travelled there two or three times because of issues involving copyright and stuff.

Brazil has the most important free software festival (FISL, which stands for International Festival of Free Software), and also they have a very important free culture movement. For example, they have an important movemente of musicians who travell all around Brazil and free their music with Creative Commons licences; this movement is called "MPB", which stands for "Música para Baixar", which stands for "Music for Downloading". They are like a reunion of musicians who do shows and stuff for living, they free their music with CC, and also make political lobby to get a change in the copyright law of Brazil.

Also, there are some things related with politics there. Lula, the ex-president of Brazil, put <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Gil">Gilberto Gil</a> as Minister of Culture. One night, Gilberto went to a festival that was celebrating there in Sao Paulo which is called "Digital Culture" ("Cultura Digital"), and he was fascinated for the things the guys were doing there. Of course, everything they were doing was illegal in terms of the copyright law. And so Gilberto decided to start a process of reform of the copyright law. Now that has been stopped by the new Minister of Culture, Ana de Hollanda, who is the sister of Chico Buarque (a popular musician from Brazil) and also known for their relationships with the ECAD (the collective society of Brazil).

But just opening the discussion made possible a cultural change about copyright there in Brazil, at least in my experience, I went there and it was an issue that occuppied pages and pages in the newspapers. Imagine that the public leader of Creative Commons Brazil, Rolando Lemos from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, has a program of free culture in MTV Brazil. About the civilian right for Internet, I can contact you with some people who where involved in the process of making that law. It was an interesting experience because it was a law open to public discussion (the copyright reform was that way too, but unfortunately that process was closed). I think I still have some brochures that the Minister of Culture wrote about the copyright reform, I scanned them because they were very radical in comparison with other speechs.

When I went to Brazil was to a thing called "International Symposium of Public Policy for Digital Collections" (http://culturadigital.br/simposioacervosdigitais/). It was an interesting event, I went there to tell my amateur experience with guys that had millions and millions of dollars to make the projects they wanted :P , so I felt like an idiot for all the time that I was there but there I make a good relation with Pedro Puntoni, who is the director of the project Brasiliana (http://www.brasiliana.usp.br/). Maybe I can make you contact with him. They have a lot of money invested in the project of Brasiliana, like $ 17,2 millions of reals (the currency of Brazil) in the project of Brasiliana and the collection of José Mindlin, an intellectual from Brazil.

If you are thinking a foreign country to move, Brazil is a good choice... the only thing is that their food is awful in comparison to argentinean food, they eat a lot of fried things and stuff, and also the women aren't as pretty as they say. But San Pablo is a nice city, people there are really good person and stuff, and it's only four hours from Rio de Janeiro, which is a beautiful place to be no matter what the season of the year is. I was in Rio in July and I was able to do kayak and be at the beach despite it was winter, so it wasn't really winter at all. And about food, you will have friends here in Argentina who will be more than happy to invite you asado and beer once in a while. :P
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Re: What is going on in Brazil?

Post by scann »

I also forgot to mention that, for example, they have FLOSS installed in all state's dependencies and they have an open access policy for publicly founded research (OER).
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