Interview with Marcos Mazoni, new director of Brazilian Technical Committee to Implement Free Software

The Worker's Party in Brazil and President "Lula" da Silva have actively encouraged a policy of migration to free software during Lula's presidential administration. This migration is far-reaching and includes a massive Digital Inclusion initiative designed to decrease the digital divide in Brazil, a number of educational initiatives based on free software (including a recent announcement about 52,000 new computer labs in Brazil based entirely on open source software) and a widespread IT migration on the federal and state level.

In April, Marcos Mazoni was appointed as head of the federal committee that oversees Brazil's migration to free software. Mazoni comes into the position with a number of successful migrations to free software at some of Brazil's largest state-owned IT companies and he was one of the first public officials to advocate a complete conversion to free software.

Free software is a revolutionary technology which carries a license that requires sharing of the underlying source code. Most of the internet runs on open source software and, generally, open source software is more secure, more stable and better developed. Examples of free software includes GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, the MySQL database (recently acquired by Sun for an astonishing $1 billion) and the software which runs Houston Indymedia!

Marcos Mazoni was recently interviewed by North-by-South, a company in San Francisco that supports the Latin American free software movement by organizing work from the Bay Area for open source developers in Central & South America. Here are the links to the interview and other information:

• Interview with Marcos Mazoni in English
• Interview with Marcos Mazoni in Portuguese
• Free Software in Latin America News Website