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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
In Argentina, a miserable economy is encouraging computer users to look for low-cost, nonproprietary solutions. Bill Gates is paying attention.
May 7, 2003 | My first clue about what was going on came when I peered through the window of the entrance to the office -- inside an exhaust-choked parking garage -- and saw a stuffed penguin sitting upright on an otherwise bare desk.
In a different world I would have seen a stylishly coiffed receptionist wearing a headset and maybe typing memos on a matte-black cordless keyboard while gazing at a matching flat-screen display. These were, after all, the offices of Argentina's Via Libre (Free Way) Foundation, an organization whose members are so influential in the free-software movement in Latin America that Edgar Villanueva, a Peruvian congressman, relied on them last year to draft his widely circulated "Response to Microsoft" letter. That missive detailed the advantages of free software so persuasively that it is credited with scaring Bill Gates into making a P.R. trip to Peru last July to give away $500,000 worth of computers loaded with Microsoft products to schools in that country.
But this was post-currency-devaluation Argentina, a country undergoing the worst economic crisis in its history. The forlorn likeness of the penguin "Tux," the Linux mascot, would have to suffice as an introduction to what Via Libre was all about.
Passing through the anteroom I discovered that I wasn't really in an office at all, but a storage space crudely refashioned to accommodate serious computing activity. In a corner by the window overlooking one of the busiest streets in Córdoba, a provincial capital that is Argentina's second-largest city, a half dozen Via Libre members were hacking away -- programming and documenting Via Libre's own free-software offering (an accounting application that may eventually form part of the GNU Enterprise suite), organizing the migration of the administration of a university in a neighboring province to a free-software platform, and communicating with Argentine officials regarding the passage of legislation that would require free-software use in government administration on both the provincial and national levels.
During the summer, the heat in here would be so unbearable that these guys couldn't make it through the afternoon without stripping down to little more than a pair of shorts. But when I visited it was July, the middle of the Argentine winter, and they were bundled in heavy sweaters and huddling over their machines, which ranged from a tiny Sony notebook to donated Sun workstations stripped of their proprietary operating systems to boilerplate boxes with Intel chip sets inside.
The foundation has since upgraded to more dignified digs, but the no-frills spirit lives on. It has to, here in Argentina, where the crushing currency devaluation has eviscerated the ability of consumers and businesses alike to purchase computer hardware and software, and where faint signs of recovery from an economic recession that has lasted more than four years are only now beginning to materialize.
Economic hard times have had a paradoxical effect on the adoption of free software in Argentina: The low costs associated with operating systems such as Linux offer obvious benefits, but the cash crunch has also encouraged the practice of pirating proprietary software, which in turn inhibits the spread of free software. In the midst of these contradictions, Via Libre soldiers on, offering a good look at how the free-software movement has become truly global.
