Brazil's love of Linux

Walk into the Ponto Frio electronics store at Sao Paulo, Brazil, which proudly displays a penguin-shaped logo, and you will find a healthy supply of Linux PCs alongside the usual Windows machines.

The store's Linux love is indicative of Brazil's deep ties to open source software. Visit the country's universities and you'll hear about many projects using open source software in new ways. Step into the Brazilian datacentres of some of the world's most advanced financial institutions and you will see they depend on the open source software for many key tasks.

One of the biggest backers of Linux has been Brazil's federal government, which has a stated preference for open source software and has mandated its use in the program that helps subsidise financing for low-cost PCs.

"What interests the government is to give options, to give alternatives to the proprietary -- to the almost monopolistic domain," said Augusto Cesar Gadelha, secretary general of Brazil's ministry of science and technology.

Many of the country's technology leaders are more pragmatic than ideological. "Open source is an interesting way to share knowledge, but 93 or 94 per cent of the computers in the world run Microsoft software," says Rodrigo Baggio, the founder of CDI, a group that has established scores of digital inclusion projects in Brazil and a half-dozen other countries.

Although Microsoft is a partner of his, he says he is not preaching Windows either. He just doesn't like the current system in which the federal government meets "in a very beautiful room in the capital and everyone needs to follow their decision."

"I believe in the power of local people to decide what kind of software they will use," Baggio said.

Gadelha said the country's stance is pragmatic.

"There are examples [of] open software which have been quite successful," Gadelha said. "In other areas, we still rely on proprietary software. If we have alternatives that prove themselves to be quite equivalent we give preference to open software model because that would allow for future developments that would allow for future betterment of the software."

And it's not just Brazil's federal government that has adopted Linux.

The mayor of Serrana has spearheaded an effort to create a Linux-based tabletop computer for students -- sort of like Microsoft's Surface crossed with the XO laptop from Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child.

The digital desks, as they are called, are aimed to be an intensely Brazilian effort. The tablet computer display at its heart was developed by Victor Mammana, a Brazilian physicist who works in the country's ministry of science and technology. The desks themselves are being outfitted in Serrana, a mid-size city three hours from here.

The idea is to take the desks already used by the city's 7,000 school kids and turn them into computers.

"The idea is not to make a business out of that, but more like a social franchise," Mammana told CNET News earlier this year. "It's interesting, this idea of providing a local solution for a local problem."

But, while there is an unquestionable open source allegiance that exists in many parts of this vast country, Linux use on consumer PCs might be somewhat illusory.

For example, a huge percentage of those Linux PCs end up with Windows shortly after they leave the store.

"We see, based on third-party researchers, that 85 per cent of the computers that are sold with open source are transformed to Windows in the first 30 days (and) another 10 per cent in next 30 days," said Jorge Salles, general manager of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential unit, which focuses on emerging markets.

Still, Microsoft knows it has a fierce competitor in Brazil.

Day 1: An emerging market faces challenges. As a PC sales market, Brazil is unquestionably strong, but it's also a place where abject poverty abounds.

Day 2: Digital inclusion, but how? While hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on digital-inclusion projects in Latin America, many of the programs start and end with the technology.

"Linux, we are seeing, has some room in the market," Salles said. "It's good that it has some room because it forces us to be better. If we are inefficient in our distribution, we need to improve that. It's really good to see a sort of new competitor in the marketplace."

Salles said that Microsoft has stepped up to the challenge, adding new efforts to sell to high schools and colleges as well as with its low-end Windows XP Starter Edition and Windows Vista Starter operating systems.

Of all the countries where Microsoft sells its starter editions of XP and Vista, Brazil is, by far, the country where the most copies are sold.

At Ponto Frio, for example, its least expensive advertised system in one newspaper was a PC advertised for US$61 (99 reais) a month, when financed over a year. A Vista Starter system with a slightly larger monitor and similar processor cost just US$67 a month, with similar financing.