We've written a ton about Brazil, and for good reason: while still dragging behind it dire legacies of poverty, violence and corruption, Lula's Brazil is plotting out what looks like the first genuinely 21st Century course for the developing world.
And more and more people are noticing; most recently, Wired. In a new piece We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin, they discuss the explosion of open-source, open-access, copyleft approaches in Brazil:
"Every license for Office plus Windows in Brazil - a country in which 22 million people are starving - means we have to export 60 sacks of soybeans," says Marcelo D'Elia Branco, coordinator of the country's Free Software Project and liaison between the open source community and the national government, now headed by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. "For the right to use one copy of Office plus Windows for one year or a year and a half, until the next upgrade, we have to till the earth, plant, harvest, and export to the international markets that much soy. When I explain this to farmers, they go nuts."This analysis goes a long way toward explaining why the Lula government loves free software. Brazil's national IT policy these days can more or less be reduced to two words: Linux roolz. "We're not just discussing one product as opposed to another here - Ford versus Fiat," says Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira, the institute's director. "We're talking about different models of development."
It's not a bad piece (though it suffers from some typical old tired Wired-isms, like the need to include a 60s countercultural figure (a "rebel") -- in this case Gilberto Gil -- or the constant, conspicuous absense of poor people). It's worth a read... but it ultimately misses the point entirely.
And I think I know why. After my talk at Poptech, Wired editor Chris Anderson approached me and said he thought the talk was a good one, but that it'd be much better if I "took all that politics out of it."
The idea that you can "take the politics" out of subjects like technology, development, trade regimes and intellectual property systems is, of course, patently absurd. There's practically nothing but politics involved here -- the technical issues, the innovation, are practically trivial in comparison to the politcal challenges involved in creating South-South science or fashioning the Brasilia Consensus. Our entire global system is a political construct, and Brazil is doing its best to hack that system to make it work better for the billions of people on this planet who don't own Microsoft stock. Technology is only a means to an end in that fight.
Brazil isn't engaged in a science project, it's declaring a revolution.
