Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s was all about technological dependency.

Brazil was hoping to leverage governmental spending to kickstart a national software development industry. Some sort of leap into the future, jumping over first the industrial era and then service-based economy we missed.

It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress, but then America had a very favorable public view as a nurturing and democratic partner. Some sort of older brother guiding you into adulthood.

Currently, at least in my bubble, the public view of America is more like a predator with Trump as a protodictator. Not necessarily true, understand me, just as that older brother view wasn’t. But it’s public perception.

A good part of that disabling of the Brazil initiative was simply free Google workspace for public universities (which were in the government plan).

I suppose that given the existencial threat level of anxiety caused by current developments will probably make Europe government immune to American lobby (at least in the short term), so I suppose this can actually happen.

Let’s see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the universities. That would be the acid test.

> It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress

Well... the bad quality of the decree itself helped at least as much as Microsoft.

Government organizations often discover it's easier to publish their software in github than to make the publishing agency accept it.

There was no migration plan, and the option that was actually pushed from the central organizations required constant contracts that were about as expensive and hard to manage as the ones with Microsoft, but hiring the government.

At the same time, the same organization that others were supposed to contract was getting delisted worldwide for bad security practices.