Open Source & Politics

According to an article in Open Source Initiative website, India and Brazil are using open source heavily to achieve high economic development (Link). These two countries with Russia and China are known as BRIC, which mean the four big and fast developing economies that supposed to lead the world economy in the 21 century. The article looks at Brazil experience and activities in open source in recent years, and how Government agencies, private industry, universities have been teaching and implementing open source solutions to create local centers of knowledge. By 2005 Brazil adapted an open source system to make an economy advantage, “the number one reason for this change is economic” says Sergio Amadeu who use to run the government National Institute for information technology in 2005 (Link).  After this very successful use of open source on a government level, other nations like Indonesia started to encourage the idea! But where is the US from all of this? It`s no secret that the US can`t force some countries and tell them what to do especially when it`s one of BRIC. Brazil already had a face to face confrontation with the US over breaking the patent of an American AIDS drug (Link) and producing a Brazilian version to sell it cheap to its citizens, and it`s basically leading this government level open source movement.

 University of Edinburgh`s lecturer Andres Guadamus claimed that the International Intellectual Property Alliance has requested the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “special 301 watchlist” which basically mean that these influential lobby group is asking the US to consider countries who uses open source as enemies of capitalism and that will lead to pressure from the US on these countries to make them change their open source policies. Link.