More about the state of Brazilian software industry. Wow, seems like the collective soul is in synch... just when I was getting interested in brazilian software economy and dynamics, and started to read some reports and information around the net,
slashdot announces that the brazilian government held the "
Legislative Free Software Week", an event whose sole purpouse was to lobby ministers, governors and deputies into free and opensource software, and one of the greatly expected announcements was that the gov't is not renewing their Microsoft Office licenses (switching to OpenOffice, maybe?). Great to see such movements around here, and I must say I'm proud of being a Brazilian even more now... one thing less to bitch about in this country :D
Okay, back to the numbers. Remember yesterday I talked about an imminent catastrophy in brazilian software economics. Now the picture gets even worse if you're a pessimist: In 2001, roughly 55 thousand or more jobs were created, but we had less than half newly graduated students in the area that year: only 24 thousand. If you consider that now the government is unveiling plans to stop using Microsoft or proprietary software, and open up the source all of it's own software currently running, we'll have a shitload of job offers, but no talents available in the market. By the simple law of supply and demand, this is going to create a huge problem: prices will go up to the stratosphere, and opportunists will win millionaire, even billionaire contracts with the government to provide open source software solutions. Of course, given they're opportunists, the actual workers being employed on the task will be forced to accept ridiculous wages, and then all the benefits of using and developing only open source software solutions to shape up the economy get all fucked up.
Being a bit more optimistic, this is a great thing. Given that the government acts wisely in this regard, the money otherwise spent on licenses will be spent on education, training and actually developing already existent talents to increase the workforce and thus balance the supply and demand. Let's hope they do it right this time. I'm leftist - but no communist or socialist or anything, I couldn't ever say I'm no capitalist - and I believe the gov't will do its best to do things right, as this is the first leftist government we have in our history, and people are all excited to do things the right way (someone please slap me for this lousy pun).
As if this post wasn't controversial enough, expect the government to deny any and all uses of Java technology, unless someone comes up with a decent, open source JVM real fast. Otherwise, I think they'll be using
Mono,
Python,
Ruby or similar alternatives. Python is getting really hot in Rio Grande do Sul (the southernmost state in Brazil), where open source incentive laws are already in place, and it's great to see a lot of brazilian Python,
Zope and
Plone developers building awesome things on the systems the state develops. I'm a little bit scared of what this holds for Java, though. I'm OK to use another language, but I'd really miss the Java platform - APIs, projects, patterns, and everything else... hopefully, Sun, IBM (who provides a hefty load of products and services for the government) can work out a license that enables Java in an opensource-only environment. One can only hope... and re-learn Python and take a better look at Mono in the process ;)
I've talked about Mono and Gnome a bit in an earlier post... and now lots of things are fitting together in my head. But I'm still concerned, as every Java developer in Brazil should be.
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