Fabián Rodríguez

I got this via FSF Latin America, however it’s beeing reported in a few other places.

The Ecuador Government now has a free-software law and will pretty much mandate that its government uses free, open-source software only. They cite “technology sovereignty and autonomy” and the main concerns, among many others.

The Ecuador Ubuntu LoCo Team is also aiming at becoming official soon… coincidence ? I think not

Alcance libre, EcuaLUG and other sites mention the news. Esteban Mendieta even has an original scan of the signed law! (mirror)

Digg this story

This usually happens in other places, not in quiet, boring-without-any-tech-news Quebec province.

Apparently Montreal-based Savoir-faire Linux has had it, and have sent the Quebec Supreme Court a Motion for Declaratory Judgement. The Régie des Rentes du Québec wants to upgrade its desktops to Windows Vista from Windows 2000 without going through any RFPs, because, well, it is an upgrade.

The full documentation of the request (including emails exchanged between the RRQ and SFL), is available online at Cyrille Beraud’s (SFL’s CEO) blog. Cyrille has been blogging about the irregularities of Quebec’s government tech bidding processes for some time now. I’ve known him for some time and I actually almost worked at SFL at the time, but instead ended up at Canonical. If you know Cyrille at any level, you know he’s not joking about this.

This would be the first time (AFAIK) that a North-American company is taking legal action against the government by going to its highest legal instance and asking it to rule as illegal their ignoring of the bidding process of one of its own organizations. So, technically this is not suing our own government, but I hope this will bring some attention to the people and other levels of local government. Although there are some interesting efforts in our province, many government organizations in Quebec are stuck in stone-age procurement systems that leave them out of cash, paying what I call licensing taxes. I wanted to explain a bit how the software business works in Quebec, but quite frankly, I just had some food and it is so disgusting I’ll save it for another rant.

For more information about the Declaratory Judgement Motion legalese, see article #453 of Quebec’s Code of Civil Procedure. Such code is “…intended to render effective the substantive law and to ensure that it is carried out; and failing a provision to the contrary, failure to observe the rules which are not of public order can only affect a proceeding if the defect has not been remedied when it was possible to do so. The provisions of this Code must be interpreted the one by the other, and, so far as possible, in such a way as to facilitate rather than to delay or to end prematurely the normal advancement of cases.” In other words, we have a Code so the actual Code is respected. Pfew!

Update: An English press release is now available.

It’ s been some time now that Savoir-faire Linux made available their Ubuntu Online Training courses, using Moodle. After trying their demo preview course (registration reqd’) I was very impressed and Yanick Cyr, a good friend of mine at SFL gave me access to the first level full course.

Shameless plug ? You bet. SFL is one of our local FLOSS success stories. I know Yanick worked his ass off on this and the result is a very complete, polished course with excellent resources. Not only do you get access to content from the official Ubuntu Training material (as SFL is an Ubuntu training partner), but SFL has gone as far as setting up regular live chat sessions, acces to a virtual Ubuntu server, quizzes, video screencasts and even a dynamically generated certificate… which you only get if you score high enough in the quizzes! And they have many other courses available.

I’ll save some of the excitement for next week when I get time to gather the screenshots I have and give a virtual tour of their course.

Well done Yanick and SFL!

Yesterday the “Proyecto de Ley del Software Libre” was presented at the Colombian House of Representatives for a first public hearing with great success, according to this news article on their site.

This is one of many steps to get any legislation in place, so it’s an important day in Free Software history for Colombia ! This is the second time after 1992 that such legislation is attempted, and I consider this to be great news, although the general intent of this legislation is presented as letting free software co-exist with proprietary software.

I wish I could have been there, this is truly a time for changes and progress in Colombia and I am excited about all the opportunities opening there. Apparently the session was recorded and is available on video, it will be interesting to watch it and see how this project was presented.

• Project dicussion and comments organized by Colibri, a Colombian free software advocacy and users group.

Wow, les Nations Unies ont adopté une Déclaration des Droits des Peuples Autochtones!

Euh… le Canada a voté contre. Ouch!

Si alguien le pregunta qué hora es en Colombia, asegúrese de que sea la hora legal!

Ayer pude ayudar a mi hermano en Cali a publicar un corto-metraje que recién me había mostrado la semana pasada. Asimismo lo pudimos enviar a unas 900 personas. Me gustó mucho que antes de enviarlo únicamente en YouTube me consultara sobre los formatos de archivos de video y las licencias libres - hacía tiempo me venía pidiendo información pero ayer tuvimos que hacer un “crash course” intensivo y este es el resultado.

En este momento hay muchos sentimientos de frustración, impotencia, incluso culpabilidad, pero al mismo tiempo satisfacción, al menos ínfima, de poder ser solidario de alguna manera en esta tragedia. Es como un puño en el estómago. En fin… decidan.

Amigos y amigas,

Este video, realizado hace algunas semanas, adquiere una triste vigencia hoy, en vista de la noticia de la muerte de 11 de los ex-diputados del Valle secuestrados desde abril de 2002.

El corto fue realizado con familiares de Juan Carloz Arbeláez, uno de los líderes asesinados y Sigifredo López, el que señalan como sobreviviente.

Espero de corazón que estas familias puedan descansar y que cese la manipulación del dolor para la guerra.

El video en formato Ogg Theora y el link a su página en YouTube se encuentran disponibles en
http://danielrodriguez.com/video/

El formato libre Ogg Theora permite verlo en Linux y muchas más plataformas fuera de Windows y Mac OSX, aunque tambien lo he subido a YouTube.

Se permite el uso y distribución bajo licencia Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 - Colombia :
http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/co/

Gracias

Daniel Rodríguez
Productor Audiovisual
Cali, Colombia

In less than 1.5 years the Venezuelan governement went from zero, creating a partnership with a Chinese company, to mass production of affordable desktop and laptop computers running free software (full specs here), with a big price difference compared to other local offerings, up to 40%! This is less than 3 years after announcing a massive move to free software in all government agencies.

I’ ve blogged before about the action in Venezuela, but this blows my mind. Well, at least as much as the Guadalinex project and their 400 000 desktops deployment.

Although they remain vague in the choice of operating systems, all the annoucements about the “Bolivarian” Computers launch do mention they will run Gnu/Linux and ” be compatible ” with Windows. Even production is local. And what capacity do they have ? 150K units a year, that’ s right 150 000 systems every year. In case you haven’t noticed, Ecuador and Cuba have recently announced free, open-source software policies to replace existing IT operations agressively. Coincidence ? I think not.

Scrolling down to the very last question in their FAQ, we can see:

De manera consecuente con la misión de alcanzar la Independencia Tecnológica de la Nación, VIT promueve el empleo del Software Libre, por lo que los equipos son entregados a solicitud del cliente con sistema operativo bajo ambiente Linux, siendo compatibles con Knoppix, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Debian y otros.

which translates to

Followin our mission to reach Technological Independency of our Nation, VIT promotes the use of Free Software, so the systems are delivered to customers with Linux operating systems, compatible with Knoppix, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Debian and others.

Other related resources:

• Free Software Foundation Latin America
• Ututo, a 100% free Gnu/Linux distribution from Argentina
• Success for free software in LatinAmerica
• Free Software Carnival: Latin America Takes to FLOSS in a Big Way

(old but surprisingly accurate)

• Debian in Venezuela, International Projects and Debian User Groups.
• Free Software conference in Bolivia (seemingly the only free software event there since 2005)