Why Brazil Loves Linux
[Disclosure: I am a dual American/Brazilian citizen. I've used Linux since 1996 and Microsoft products since 1990. I like both platforms.]
Brazil often makes Linux-related headlines, the latest being the adoption of KDE in Brazilian public schools. It’s clear that Brazil is enamored with Linux, but why? This is an important question for Microsoft since emerging markets are key to sales growth. Microsoft’s Annual Report 2007 reported that “impressive growth included India, China, and Brazil which all delivered revenue growth that topped 40 percent”, which is much faster than growth in developed countries. These markets are also friendly towards Linux and pose significant challenges for Microsoft. This post is my take on the reasons for Brazil’s fondness of Linux. I speak for Brazil since I was born and raised there, but I think much of this applies to the other BRIC countries and emerging markets in general.
The first and obvious argument is economic: free as in beer is a big deal in Brazil’s economy. The table below contrasts the economics of license costs in the US and in Brazil:
| US | Brazil | |
| Gross National Income (GNI) per capita | $44,710 | $4,710 |
| Cost of Windows Vista Business | $186 | $364 |
| Cost of MS Office 2007 Standard | $289 | $587 |
| Cost of Business Licenses as % of GNI per capita | 1.06% | 20.1% |
| Cost of Windows Vista Home Basic | $116 | $252 |
| Cost of Office Home/Student | $109 | $117 |
| Cost of Home Licenses as % of GNI per capita | 0.5% | 7.8% |
| All figures in US dollars. An exchange rate of USD$1 = R$1.70 was used to compute the cost of licenses in Brazil. | ||
You might be surprised to learn that Microsoft licenses are nearly twice as expensive in Brazil in absolute terms. I imagine Microsoft charges about the same and Brazil’s brutal tax burden makes up the rest (the taxes are built into the price). But the interesting result is the relative price of licenses in each society, captured as % of GNI per capita. As a proportion of national incomes, business licenses are nineteen times more expensive to Brazilian society and home licenses are fifteen times more expensive. While GNI per capita is not a perfect figure, it reflects the incomes people make, how much they spend to live, and how much they pay in taxes. It is a crucial number when it comes to public policy; it’s not hard to understand why rational policies must dodge licensing costs when possible. If there’s any hope of widespread computer access, then surely we can’t expect people to spend 7.8% of their annual income on Microsoft software licenses alone. The burden on small businesses is also prohibitive. This order-of-magnitude difference is a fundamental problem that can’t be solved by piecemeal license giveaways. Suppose Microsoft gave out Windows and Office wholesale to all schools. Then what happens if those kids need a computer at home or in their parents’ business? License costs are simply out of whack with respect to most of society. Using Linux in public schools, rarely attended by richer kids, seems inescapable.
Notice that I didn’t use Windows Vista Starter Edition in the figures. This is because I find the limitation of three simultaneous programs absurd. It’s hard to believe Microsoft put in such an abominable restriction; it’s one thing to quietly omit features, it’s quite another to slap people on the face with “Sorry, no, only 3 programs! Click OK to continue.” Even the limited hardware supported by Vista Starter can easily run multiple programs, so that’s no excuse. I imagine a kid trying to learn programming in such a machine, trying to run a few tools plus a test application, and being told to bugger off. How is this bridging the digital divide? Besides, there are limitations on buying Vista Starter - a family receiving a donated computer, for example, cannot buy a retail version of it. And to cap it off, if they went ahead and bought OEM, the dollar figure for Vista Starter + Office Home comes to 5% of GNI per capita, still an order of magnitude above the US figure.
Looking at these numbers, you might wonder how Microsoft sales could grow 40% in Brazil last year - I mean, do they even have computers there? It turns out that Brazil has both the 10th largest economy in the world and the 11th worst distribution of income. There are wealthy households, businesses, and government departments to whom license prices matter far less. For example, after the dollar plunge the cost in dollars of a programmer in Brazil is close to that of one in the US, provided the employer is paying all taxes (the norm for mid-size and large businesses). These wealthier pockets comprise a sizable market whose landscape is more similar to the US: labor costs dwarf license costs, MS Office is a near-monopoly, and inertia is in Microsoft’s favor. Since this market is in Brazil’s economy the licensing costs still consume relatively more purchasing power, but Microsoft can definitely compete in these niches. Except there’s more to the story than economics.
Many cultural issues work against Microsoft to mobilize Brazilians in favor of the Penguin. I’ll hit up the three I deem biggest: 1) utter disregard for copyright, 2) strong anti-Microsoft feelings, and 3) Linux alpha geek monopoly. A thorny reality aggravates the first two issues: anti-American sentiment. It’s worth looking at this sentiment for context. The Pew Research Center runs the Pew Global Attitudes Project to track global public opinion on a variety of issues. Their latest report shows continued decline in US image, which has plummeted around the globe in the past 5 years. Here’s the data:
I was shocked to see these results at first. Things might not be as bleak as the numbers suggest though. Some of the backlash is not structural, but rather directed at the current US Administration. It may well subdue come January 2009. Yet it’s important for American companies to factor this in when thinking about markets abroad. Nothing new there, except for how bad things got. Anti-American sentiment is particularly strong in 3 of the BRIC: Brazil, Russia, and China. (In Brazil this is only a political/ideological thing, one-on-one people are still as friendly as ever towards Americans and everyone else.) Keep these numbers in mind when thinking about the factors below, starting with disregard for copyright.
When I was growing up in Brazil, paying for software licenses was about as natural as a third arm growing out of your back. Whenever you needed software, you’d dial up a friendly pirate and buy a “collection” for, uh, $30. That included, my friends, instant home delivery: the guy would drive to your house and deliver the collection. If you were programming at night, he might even bring you a pizza. The best pirates had good access to the warez scene and could find anything in case you had a custom request. In the collection you’d find cracked versions of several major pieces of software from various manufacturers. How convenient. Borland Delphi? Check. Visual Studio? Check. Windows NT 4.0 Server, Workstation? Check. Linux? Check (saves you the download). It was like MSDN for the whole computer industry! The piracy happened regardless of income levels - people “buying” the software were by no means poor (otherwise they wouldn’t have a computer in the first place, at that point in time). Many could easily afford licenses, yet felt absolutely no qualms about piracy. The whole culture disregarded copyrights deeply. To most people, the pirate was doing honest work: downloading all this stuff, burning it, delivering it. An honorable job.
Things have changed since then, but not much. Copyright enforcement is more serious; piracy within mid-size or large businesses is rare. There is more copyright awareness (or indoctrination, depending on whom you ask). Home users still pirate anything they can though. This is not restricted to software either: visit any campus in Brazil and you’ll see rampant photocopying of text books. Street vendors sell DVDs filled with MP3s, movies, you name it. I’m sure Hollywood execs have nightmares where they’re roaming the streets of Brazil. The culture still expects free distribution and the environment is very hostile to proprietary software licenses.
Before Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft’s strategy was to ignore the pirates: sell to the corporations, let everyone else copy it. Now regular people are growing third arms and paying for Windows licenses. Fair enough: middle-class fat cats should not be ripping off your software. The trouble is that nowadays not all cats are fat: years of sound macroeconomic policy have allowed lower-middle-class people to buy computers. This is a change from when I was there. There are now many folks who, though not poor, definitely have a very hard time paying for licenses. They either go to Linux or go unpatched. The need to buy software would effectively keep these families out of computing: they do back flips just to get the hardware itself, in the hopes of giving their children a better shot. And richer people resent paying for software, however messed up that is. Every customer cut off by Windows Genuine Advantage is a possible conversion to Linux or at the very least a little more pressure towards migration. If people had to pay for Office too, there’d be gnashing of teeth. I’m not suggesting Microsoft is responsible for fixing severe income inequality or supporting middle-class free loaders; that’s just the nut they need to crack with a creative revenue model because Linux fits like a glove. On to the next issue.
Vista Starter caps you at 3 programs. This is not how you win friends and influence people.
Brazil imported the anti-Microsoft stance common in American geeks, but on top of the usual arguments Microsoft is foreign. This adds fuel to the flame. To the Brazilian Microsoft hater, not only there is an “evil monopoly”, but its profits are repatriated and its jobs are elsewhere. Practices like the 3-program limitation on Vista Starter further erode good will (Brazilians call it the “castrated Windows” among other colorful names). Add a dash of anti-American sentiment and you’ve got some serious resistance. This fiery mood has a strong influence, from the teenager hanging out in #hackers on Brasnet to IT departments to the federal government. Even in a rational self-interest analysis, one might rightly point out that if free/open source software (FOSS) were to wipe out Windows, negative effects on Brazil’s economy are likely minimal. The wealth, jobs, and opportunity created by Microsoft aren’t in Brazil (productivity gains might be, but that’s a whole different argument). The trade offs of a potential Linux/Google take over are different when there’s no national off-the-shelf software industry, plus Google’s revenue model works beautifully in a developing country. This mix of ideological and rational arguments torpedoes Microsoft’s support.
The third cultural issue working for Linux is more subtle. In the US people talk about Microsoft losing the alpha geeks, but in Brazil FOSS has already reached a near-monopoly on them. Again, the standard reasons apply but are augmented by the local realities. Before FOSS, interesting software work was very rare in Brazil and the chance to shape widely used products practically did not exist. Imagine a place where 80% of programmers build boring, low-powered line-of-business applications working in conditions exactly opposite of Peopleware. That’s the US. Make it 99% and you have Brazil. In the US we have a wildly dynamic economy full of start-ups and interesting companies soaking up talent fast, but not so in Brazil. David Solomon, co-author of Windows Internals, was working for DEC at 16. But what if there is no one building a kernel in a 3,000-mile radius? Emigration was the most realistic possibility for interesting work. A 16-year-old would have been out of luck.
The FOSS revolution plus the Internet changed all this. Now people in Brazil can actually develop interesting and widely used programs. We’ve got kernel hackers like Marcelo Tosatti, who maintained the 2.4 Linux kernel series, and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, who co-founded the Conectiva distribution. There are RedHat employees, Debian contributors, committers on various projects, and so on. Lua, the programming language, comes from Brazil. There’s a practical advantage in being able to, say, tune a distribution for a particular purpose (e.g., the distribution being delivered to public schools). But beyond that it’s inspiring to finally be able to work with talented people in cool projects and have a chance to participate, rather than be handed down a proprietary product built abroad over which you have zero control. People are excited about and grateful for this. By the time you mix up these elements nearly all talented CS students and alpha geeks are well into the Linux camp. Unlike the US, the dynamic economy isn’t there to add some fragmentation. When these people go on to make technology choices in government or industry, guess what they’ll pick?
So that’s it. I think these are the main factors in Brazil’s love affair with Linux: economics, disregard for copyright, anti-Microsoft sentiment, and massive alpha geek support. These factors feed off each other, all pushing towards Linux. Millions of kids using KDE would impact the work force eventually. If Microsoft is overzealous in their anti-piracy efforts, it might precipitate faster changes in this delicate market. Meanwhile, Google Docs and Open Office are catching on. There are tactical moves Microsoft could make to counter Linux momentum, like a more sustainable licensing model for homes and small businesses (maybe their announced annuity licensing?), better native branding, and perhaps some native development. But Google has done all three already and is very well-liked in Brazil despite the anti-US feelings. My Brazilian friends, even a pragmatic IT manager who plays poker with Microsoft Brazil employees, seem to operate on the assumption that an eventual Linux take over (with some combination of Google/Google Docs/Open Office) is just a matter of time. What holds it back is that all the factors discussed here can spark things up, but until desktop Linux is ready to catch on fire you get much hype and little change. The wood does seem drier and drier, so we’ll see. What do you think?
May 1, 2008 at 1:57 am | Filed Under Linux
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66 Responses to “Why Brazil Loves Linux”
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What is the Brazilian government’s tax rate on the software?
The guy commenting above me beat me to the first point: the comparison of MS licensing prices is not fair if you don’t take out the tax rate out of the Brazilian price.
My second point is that comparing licensing price to GNI per capita only proves that Brazil is a poor country, not that MS is expensive. It is a global economy after all: the price point chosen by MS to their products will determine what they think is their better balance for supply and demand in a *global* scale - though luck (for them) if the Brazilian buyer is left out of the party by that. If they were to charge different rates in different regions of the world would we be back to what, DVD region codes?
As for the rest of the article, I think it was a well-made point about particular features of the Brazilian market that may facilitate the mass adoption of free software and linux on the desktop. However, Brazil is no different from other countries in respect of the other general challeges Linux faces, such as ease to use, hardware support, etc.
Renato: it doesn’t matter whether the relative high cost of Windows is due to Windows costing more or Windows being heavily taxed and the population being relatively poor, the result is that Windows is at a huge price disadvantage in Brazil. Economics, the “dismal science”, isn’t about what’s “fair”, it’s about what actually exists.
It just happens this time that the “victim” of the economic equation is a big company rather than a poor worker, and somehow that makes it seem different, yes no?
nevermind taxes or high prices in brazilian market. people buy popular PCs (getting cheaper and cheaper) running crappy Linux distributions (with no tech support of any kind) and fill them almost imediately with cheap or even free Windows pirate copies (still no support, but it’s something always a friend can help).
“the comparison of MS licensing prices is not fair if you don’t take out the tax rate out of the Brazilian price.”
I think it’s a very fair comparison because it’s the actual price people have to pay for their software in Brazil. They are not avoiding those taxes, they have to take them into consideration before buying a MS license.
“My second point is that comparing licensing price to GNI per capita only proves that Brazil is a poor country, not that MS is expensive. It is a global economy after all: the price point chosen by MS to their products will determine what they think is their better balance for supply and demand in a *global* scale - though luck (for them) if the Brazilian buyer is left out of the party by that. If they were to charge different rates in different regions of the world would we be back to what, DVD region codes?”
Expensive it’s something relative, things one considerate expensive, others considerate it cheap. And yes, for a poor country, Microsoft licenses are expensive. I am not saying a company should offer a different price in every country, but it’s obvious it will not compete as well in those countries simply because people can’t afford their products, so they will search a different solution. Which, is this case, it’s Linux.
“Brazil is no different from other countries in respect of the other general challeges Linux faces, such as ease to use, hardware support, etc.”
Well, is not like Windows it’s problems free, both Windows and Linux have a lot of problems. The difference it’s, people get Windows preinstalled so many problems gets taken care of before give it to the client, and Brazilian (or users in any other country) have access to the source code and can work on solve the problems instead of rely on a foreign company to do it for them.
@Tsu Dho Nimh: The tax rate is not really on the software itself. The problem is that the overall tax rates in Brazil are higher, making all products more expensive. It’s not a specific software tax. It might be a duty/import tax, I’m not sure, they’ve got a labyrinthine tax system down there. None of this really matters though per Resuna’s point.
@Resuna, @Juan: right on.
@Renato: hi there. Taking out the tax rate still leaves prices as a huge proportion of GNI per capita, but more importantly, the taxes are a reality and it’s what the consumer ends up paying. Since Linux is free as in beer, that goes away with Linux. Whether any of this is “fair” I don’t know, my point is the disconnect between proprietary license prices and Brazil’s economy.
Gustavo,
As you show up in the first chart, US GNI per capita is pratically 10 times Brazil’s, and almost all prices seem to be placed wrongly on the opposite column, even disproportionally if you change them sidewards.
About the tax rating on imported goods, it has something to do with self protection, of course. But I ask you, do we ‘produce’ our own Brazilian operating systems or other software mentioned above? Even the KDE is adopted for our schools. Who would dare to ‘create’ one in the middle of so many free distribuitions? Shouldn’t the MS prices be “a bit” lower? Sure!!!
Something must be done, no matter by lowering tax rates or prices, unless FOSS does it. Unless the people do it by avoiding MS products and gathering open source software, mainly when a Linux LTS 8.04 is just around, much better than many think about.
Gustavo, great for your initiative to open our reality on this point to the world.
Thanks!
[...] link [...]
I think you are missing an important point, which may also answer why people remain passionate about FOSS long after their initial reasons for getting involved (covered by your analysis) have subsided. FOSS gets better as more people use it because more people are available to contribute to it while, at the same time, every contribution however small becomes more valuable.
Computer science is a basic subject in education these days just as “reading, writing and arithmetic” has been for centuries. Every kid knows (or should know) computers and how to program them.
With proprietary software you restrict involvement to only those who choose computer science as a career. With FOSS anyone can get involved and contribute, and you don’t need to be an alpha-geek. In numerous projects even non-programmers are contributing by contributing the user guides, art work, advocacy, marketing, quality testing, or just contributing feature ideas or providing feedback on how they use the product in the real-world.
If you understand what technology really is then you will appreciate how the FOSS community model works so much better than the proprietary model for commodity products.
So what is technology? It’s just ideas that are put to use (in ways that are repeatable, i.e. products).
Why is FOSS better for this as a model? In the proprietary model you only get to use the product but not the ideas that the product is built on. With FOSS you get both the product and the ideas, plus a bonus - insight into how the ideas are translated into the product. You get three fundamentally life-changing things rather than just one.
Petrosky: I’m glad you liked the post. De nada
Rosco: These are good points. There is a whole lot of discussion I left out of this post, not least of which because it was already 2am heheh. I tried to stick with what I saw were clear, immediate reasons though.
The discussion on social/economic aspects of open source is fascinating, but broad and complicated. I do hope to write more on this some time… for now some nice technical posts would be great because bits and bytes are a lot easier than messy humans.
As you took time to visit and comment on my site, i’ĺl share some of my experience with open source and government in Brazil.
Being a public servant since 2006, I found out that sometimes the choice in government agencies for open source/free software has nothing to do with laws, policies or technical reasons. It’s about timely deploy and continued service. What usually happens is that buying proprietary software needs to go trough an expensive and time consuming bureaucratic process (called licitação) that will take in the best 6 months, but usually much more (in our agency it takes usually 1 to 2 years for software, while hardware is less lengthy, taking 6 months to a year).
Also, the heads of departments and directors change often due to political agreements (whenever there’s a state secretary change, all the bosses are changed). This usually comes accompanied by a change in focus, canceling of projects currently being developed and starting of new projects. And thus, licensing and upgrades of software products get also canceled. What’s the solution we found for the long term? Open source! thatś the only way we can guarantee that the software will continue running even if the licenses are not renewed. that’s the only way we can guarantee updates to the software.
So while government might not be contributing much to the open and free software movements in Brazil, it is a great consumer of OSS. For the wrong reasons, of course…
Excellent article, thank you.
The statistics makes the point very compellingly. I suspect it would be even more so if one would compare the price with purchasing power, and use the median over the average (the number of operating system “sales” be it linux or MS is spread more or less over the number of users, not over the income of each user).
Further, only the part of the income available after a person have paid for subsistence is relevant.
On top of this comes the fact that hardware might come at a rather low cost, far lower than is generally calculated, since perfectly well working computers can be collected as garbage in western countries - as an example, this works for most every single crt.
Point is, the 20 factor is likely rather low, even considering the income distribution in the states.
[...] Find out exactly why Brazil loves Linux. [...]
“A thorny reality aggravates the first two issues: anti-American sentiment”
This was the MOST stupid part of the article.
NO ONE, believe me, NO ONE of my friends would EVER stop using MS Windows because they disagree with the political views of US. So anti american sentiment means that they wont use google, yahoo and other companies based in US ?!
Maybe Linux aficionados do use this excuse just to justify their reasons to be using Linux…
It’s not surprising that Brazilians like Linux. It’s surprising that Microsoft is growing there. 20 years ago I was an early developer of applications for Microsoft windows. It has become clear in the US that if you really come up with a great idea, a clone will show up bundled with windows by Microsoft. Even the logo for the company I worked for showed up in a modified version in a MS Windows release. So about 10 years ago, the startup money moved away from applications for Microsoft windows products. That’s why even Google doesn’t go against Microsoft in the traditional model of applications sales.
castrated windows…lol..
@girino: thanks for this explanation, that’s pretty interesting. I guess there’s a lot of flexibility in “free as in beer”, and this is one instance of it. Abraco.
@James: cool, I’m glad you liked the post. Those are good points about the statistics. There’s a lot to work with here, looking at disposable income is interesting, and the distribution of incomes - instead of a dumb average like GNI per capita - is definitely the way to go if someone wants to take a more serious look at this stuff.
@HangLoose: anti-US views contribute in two ways: 1) when it comes to copyright, people in emerging markets are less willing to play along because they know the money is not staying in their country. This is a common thing, plenty of people within these countries argue that they _should_ ignore copyrights and other intellectual property laws since economically they’re disproportionately in the paying end of things and not so much in the receiving end. The “fairness”, or lack thereof, of any of this I won’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Now if you compare, say, views of the EU and the US in the Pew report, you might see how when the copyright belongs to an American company people might even less inclined to go along with IP laws.
The second way anti-US sentiment shows up is in anti-MS rhetoric. Are those poor grounds for a technical/economic decision? Probably, but it does happen, and not only among people’s friends, but among government officials too.
Regarding other brands, there’s wide variation in how much brands get affected by this. Of course Microsoft’s brand problems are not restricted to Brazil. The anti-US thing becomes one more thing. Google, on the other hand, is well-liked, perhaps too well liked. Of course, Google doesn’t depend on respect for copyrights to make money, nor do they depend on licenses…
It’s impossible to measure the effect of “anti-US sentiment”, but based on conversations in Brazil, reading the Brazilian press, and so on, I do think it plays a role.
Nichol: Microsoft has a large installed user base, and as the economy grows and the installed computer base grows, it’s natural that their revenue would grow along. Also, I’m sure Windows Genuine Advantage brought a lot of paying customers along. It’ll be interesting to see how things go after the first wave of WGA folks bought their licenses. 40% is a heck of a lot of growth, Brazil GDP growth was around 4% last year if I remember right. It’d make sense if a lot of the 40% were people paying up due to WGA.
lingghezhi: hahahah. You should see some of the jokes they come up with…
A well researched and informative article, backed with data. Kudos!
[...] terms of free software. Details have been dribbling out here and there, but this is by far the best summary of the situation there: Brazil imported the anti-Microsoft stance common in American geeks, but on [...]
Excellent article. But, one thing that you failed to mention, or failed to adequately capture, is that the economic issue is really IMHO a side issue. (I am a frequent traveler to Brazil, and married to one :)) and the growth in linux in Brazil is certainly NOT driven by the lower middle class, they will “buy” Windows from the pirates so as to whitewash any impression that they cannot afford to buy a computer from a store, perish the thought that they could not afford a Windows License.
Linux has been driven by wealthy (relatively) upper-middle class Alpha geeks who find the closed-source model unpalatable. It goes to something deeper in Brazilian culture, a more collectivist, less individualistic attitude, which is fertile ground for collective software works, like GNU/Linux. Not only that, but it provides Brazilians with a fun sort of revolutionary standpoint, rising up against a great power and thumbing their nose at authority.
Why Brazil Loves Linux?
es.youtube.com/watch?v=ObcC441YIvs&NR=1
[...] recently linked to this comparison of the cost of Windows in Brazil and the US. This brings to mind a point I think I’ve seen [...]
n on: thanks
gringinho: good points, you clearly know Brazil hehe. Here are my thoughts:
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the economic issue a side issue. As long as lower-income folks can get by with pirate Windows, then yes, they’ll do it. But with Windows Genuine Advantage the free-for-all piracy has ended, it’s getting harder and it sounds like Microsoft may take it up a notch or two. In _those circumstances_ I do think lower-income people will flock to Linux. At present, it’s not so strong, you’re quite right, even because these people are not tech savvy and unlikely to go mess around with this “obscure OS” hehe.
And the computer user base keeps growing and including ever-poorer folks. Check the Economist article from last year, “Goodbye poverty, Hola Consumption” for some interesting stuff on this. Again, piracy is the only way these guys can stomach proprietary software.
Also the economic issue is not limited to households. You must think of the government… tax collection happens on a $4k GNI per capita reality, and govt expenditures on software licenses must work within that reality.
Computer donations is another thing… I am myself working to try to get some hardware donations going on to Brazil, but I don’t get any licenses. There are too many ways in which Brazil’s poverty come up, it’s in the fabric of society and is incompatible with these costs.
It all depends a lot on how much piracy MS allows (which in the past has been “all the piracy households want”, but changed).
Concerning the “revolutionary / rising up” cultural factors, yes, I definitely think those exist as well. I don’t know that I’d call Brazil very collectivist though… there are elements of that, and there are elements of a nasty selfishness. I find Americans very cooperative and in some ways _more_ collectivist, despite the “rugged individualism” mantra. These are complex issues of course, to nail down subtle cultural aspects.
@groove armada: cool video. I use MS-Windows on the desktop myself, so I miss out on all the X/KDE goodness. At least I have cygwin, putty, Vim, etc.
Very good article, I’d like to translate a part of it and give the link for it in my blog. Do you think it would be ok?
I would also try to give some numbers for my own country (Romania) which is just two positions above Brazil concerning GNI.
Could you give me details about the licenses used for the comparison, maybe a serial number?
Best regards,
BMoro
[...] Why Brazil Loves Linux [...]
@BMoro: that is totally fine. Regarding the licenses, the prices in the table are actually links, so if you click on them it’ll show you the exact product. Hope that helps, cheers.
My oh my. This has got to be one of the most interesting debates I’ve seen of late. All involved seem to be well informed and passionate on the Linux vs Microsoft matter.
All I can do is sit back and think of peanut butter and cheese.
Thanks a lot! It seems the numbers for Romania are far worse than Brazil: Cost of Business Licenses as % of GNI per capita - 27.2 %
Cost of Home Licenses as % of GNI per capita - 12.1 %.
De ce Brazilia prefera Linuxul…
Articolul dupa care am facut adaptarea prezinta o analiza a pietei IT in Brazilia in ceea ce priveste…
I don’t understand your argument that widespread disregard of copyright is advantageous to Linux and disadvantageous to Microsoft. If somebody pirates Microsoft Software it costs Microsoft nothing and increases their user base. It would be different if the pirates were paying for Microsoft software before they started pirating, but this is clearly not the case. A larger user base benefits Microsoft even if they derive no immediate revenue. So piracy helps Microsoft.
Discouraging piracy is what hurts Microsoft. (Like Windows Genuine Advantage? Didn’t I read MS was now allowing software updates of unregistered products?) Those markets, the well off alpha geek, the government, that don’t pirate is where Microsoft is hurting the most.
What would the relative Microsoft/Linux market shares if you took pirated software out of the equation? If everyone who pirated Microsoft couldn’t?
These are difficult numbers to obtain but are the most interesting because, in my opinion, once Linux gains a preponderance of users in these metrics it’s only a matter of time before the majority of the software pirates also switch to Linux. I would be interested in your guesses as to the numbers. It’s easy to guess wrong. Microsoft sells a _lot_ of software in every market.
As a country gains wealth there’s more dis-incentives to the use of pirated software. This is what’s troubling Microsoft when it comes to the developing world.
[...] take on software development and the business thereof” and he here writes why Brasil Loves Linux and GNU and all that jazz - this might be worth [...]
@Karl: Much of what you said is true, but I think it’s important to make some distinctions: gross market share (including piracy) vs. revenue, past vs. present, and piracy itself versus the “disregard for copyright” (which are related, but different).
By definition piracy increases market share, so no disagreement there. The trouble are the revenues.
I think over the years in Brazil piracy hurt Microsoft revenues greatly. For a very long time, until just a few years ago, computers were exclusively in the upper middle class and wealthier businesses. These folks: 1) could very well afford licenses, 2) pirated massively (it was/is _alien_ to buy software in Brazil, as I say in the post) and 3) had no option but to run Microsoft software (Linux was not viable at that point, Apple was nowhere). So I think Microsoft missed out on a _lot_ of revenue over the years due to the piracy. Did they have market share? You bet, monopoly-level market share. But the revenues coming from households, I imagine, was ludicrously low. This must have added up to a lot of lost revenues, so I do think it hurt Microsoft substantially.
Recently there has been a democratization of computing as the country gets wealthier and the economy is stable allowing poorer folks to buy more expensive durable items, including computers. Some of _these_ guys fall exactly in what you describe, where if not for piracy MS would lose them entirely. This is still a minority of the household market.
So, looking at this angle of revenues versus market share, then WGA makes more sense. It does, as you point out, hurt market share, but on the other hand it boosts revenues. It’s a pretty messy affair from Microsoft’s point of view. Their stock has sucked for a long time, they’re under pressure to grow sales, and trying to boost revenues in emerging markets is one way they hope to do it from what I gather.
Then there’s the cultural aspect which I tried to capture with my anecdote in the post. People are _really_, _really_ not used to buying software, and several balk at it (not only because of the price). One way to say it is that the social contract underlying proprietary software - strong copyright - is far weaker in Brazil. That’s the other way where the disregard is advantageous to Linux, because society has a high expectation of free distribution, which Linux fits perfectly. This makes WGA more painful there too, due to this double whammy of economics + expectations, whereas the situation say in the US is much simpler since it’s very common to have licensed copies.
Also the fact that Google does not need to rely on copyright is a massive asset in such a culture, thereby hurting MS indirectly.
What do you think? Does this make sense? These are complicated issues, and also it’s hard to reason since we’re not privy to the data MS have. Regarding the numbers, I am going to try to dig them up or at least reach a decent back-of-the-envelope estimate, but I’m currently swamped with my business so I can’t do much.
I am an American that has been working in and out of Brazil since the Mid-Eightys. I have seen tremendous changes there for the better economically. Brazil has always had the resources to be a significant contributor to the entire planet and I see it (less now than in the past), as a paradox. The problem in the past has been mainly political which has caused the country to have many of it’s issues. I see a lot promise that will finally be realized from that country. Microsoft always has been and always will be modeled of the very firm that they originally called “the evil empire”, IBM. I like your article very much and brings to light many very relavent issues pertaining to the market there. Linux will become more mainstream on the application side, the way Redhat has become mainstream on the server side and the way Microsoft unseated IBM and Novell etc etc etc. Those of us who have been in the industry long enough know that the tide eventually shifts. While I completely agree that all Linux distros will not survive and MS will not disapear from the landscape. The truth is if Linux was so fringe as some of your contributors say, would Microsoft have an “Open” initiative and create tie ups with various Linux distros. The same contributors will say, “it is simply good business sense”. I say, that the statement itself says it all. Regarding software piracy, there will always be this. And more so in an environment where the need for better education is an issue. This too will change and has been already with costs dropping and the median income increasing. And don’t forget, our almighty dollar is almost where it was in value in Brazil against the reais in 1994. Brazil has always been a wonderful secret and based on reading some of these responses it continues to be!!!
I think piracy is an integral part of all corporate marketing strategies in developing markets. The key thing you want is market share, whether it’s in the US market in the 1980’s and early 90’s when desktop computers were first adopted or today in developing economies.
Once you’ve got market share, no matter how you achieve it — and piracy is an extremely cost-effective method, the market is yours to lose. You can introduce lock-in via embrace and extend techniques, you have the natural inertia of people not wanting to change, the huge time investment in procedures and training and other soft costs that make switching difficult, and so forth.
Getting users to pay is easy once everybody’s using your software. You can set the level of piracy at that point to whatever your models predict will maximize revenue without losing users. There are plenty of ways to prevent piracy. Registration, hardware dongles, network checks to ensure that the same copy is not running on more than one machine, and so forth. The commercial software industry abandoned most of them in the 1980’s because they weren’t worth it. It was a better idea to let your customers pirate. Today Microsoft continues to fine-tune their piracy levels by making adjustments like weather or not you can get updates without registration, how hard the registration process is to crack, and so forth.
You really think Microsoft couldn’t make their registration process virtually uncrackable?
Disrespect for copyright enables piracy, and so benefits Microsoft.
Microsoft may not be as rich as it might, but they’re not hurting. Look at the profit margins on their moneymakers. Nobody has profit margins like that. If they see trouble they can just shut down some of their money-losing enterprises. (Think Zune.) In my opinion Microsoft’s downfall will be the difficult to measure impact of FOSS penetration. It’s that $60,000,000,000.00 of money, annually, (according to some recent study or another) that’s _not_ been spent on proprietary software, and does not show up as revenue on any body’s balance sheet and get reported in the trade press. One day MS will wake up and find that most people know that they don’t need to spend so much on software. Already MS is paying off the hardware manufacturers (ASUS and the EEE 900) to keep Linux more expensive than MS Windows, or at least make sure Linux is not cheaper. MS can only plug leaks in the dam like this for so long. Sooner or later they’re going to miss a leak and the dam is going to collapse.
I like to believe that people everywhere would respect copyright if the circumstances were right. People are willing to respect those who help them. If your neighbor lends you a hammer to fix your roof you’ll respect their request that you not break rocks with it, unless the neighbor is inside your house taking your stuff while you’re up on the roof. Respect for a benefactor’s wishes is, after all, ultimately what enables the share and share alike world of copyleft that benefits us all.
[...] Why Brazil Loves Linux : Gustavo Duarte - “These markets are also friendly towards Linux and pose significant challenges for Microsoft. This post is my take on the reasons for Brazil’s fondness of Linux. I speak for Brazil since I was born and raised there, but I think much of this applies to the other BRIC countries and emerging markets in general.” [...]
To the person that said Linux LTS 8.04: you mean Ubuntu LTS 08.04. Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux, and only Ubuntu to my knowledge uses that versionning scheme. The Linux kernel which is common to all distros (Fedora, OpenSuse, etc), has version numbers like 2.4 and 2.6. In short, Linux is not Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is a Linux distro.
I hate Microsoft’s hypocrisy. They are allowing piracy on purpose, and then they have the nerve to try and make us feel guilty about piracy, and they make us pay the price financially and practically for it even if we’re not guilty. I don’t believe copyright has the moral high ground anyway, see questioncopyright.org .
Sorry for the delay in the replies, I’ve been working crazy hours lately.
@Xandros: I also notice the improvements there. I go to Brazil once or twice a year (though I hope to live there again for a while) and every time I’m there I notice more signs of improvement. The quality of the federal government, both FHC and Lula, has improved dramatically, with serious policies and smart technocrats making sound policy decisions to a much larger degree than ever before. I’m pretty hopeful, so we’ll see how it plays out.
@Karl: I agree that piracy is a part of marketing, not only a strategy for market penetration but also an interesting form of price discrimination. It’s like free web startups, with the benefit that some customers do pay.
But here’s why I don’t see it benefiting Microsoft in this instance:
1) Throughout the 80s and 90s, the lack of piracy would have had very little impact on Microsoft’s growth in Brazil. They could have made a _lot_ of money during that period without detriment to market share. So I think piracy hurt.
The situation is now more complicated because Linux is a viable desktop and a formidable challenge on the server side. At the same time their flat stock has them wanting to extend some of the sweet profit margins you mention to other markets. But here’s how again piracy hurts:
2) Without widespread piracy and disregard for copyright, Microsoft would not need WGA. The customers who can afford it would pay gladly, and the ones who can’t would pirate. Great price discrimination. With the disregard of copyright, we have two issues: a) the paying customers _resent_ paying because it’s alien, and b) MS ends up having to do WGA and hence it loses the price discrimination, locking out poorer customers. Both of these effects are bad.
Regarding the cracking, I have cracked software years ago out of curiosity and the advantages to the attacker are enormous (I cracked, but didn’t install :P). I would say this: during MS-DOS and the non-Internet days of Windows, it would _not_ have been cost effective to deploy unbreakable or virtually unbreakable copy protection. I do not think it could have been done after you factor in the costs.
Finally, with regards to copyright, I do share your view that people respect things in the right circumstances, but I do not agree at all with your analogy. I do _not_ think copyright is a clear cut moral issue as you describe, not by a long shot.
In fact, I think the moral foundations of copyright are rooted in a trade off between suppressing our general freedoms (to do as we wish with a work) and maximizing social benefit (the increased economic and creative activity we derive from it). Many of the ideas around it came about in very different circumstances in a different age, and also many of these trade offs are different for a country when all of the GDP benefit happens elsewhere. It is not a hammer-from-the-neighbor matter. I sometimes wish I had time to go away with Adam Smith, John Locke, the founding fathers, and a choice selection of court decisions to think about all this.
I personally was very much hurt by this Brazilian disregard of copyright when I was there doing ISVs and such. It was terrible. As soon as we could we switched to an Internet business model, which in my case was subscription to a stock market analysis product we had.
@Jadd: exactly, I think copyright is not clear cut at all. But at the same time, having founded ISVs, I do have a respect for it. Like Count Mondego says, “it’s complicated.”
People who “buy” Micro$oft crap are real OXYMORONS.
I just use VectorLinux and PC-BSD. Both systems are stable, fast, secure, and TOTALLY FREE (as in beer and speech).
Smart people use smart software! Go for it, guys!
I’m in Argentina, same applies
I only use XP because it is the standard de facto, but almost every other soft in my PC is free.
Thunderbird, Firefox, Open Office, Faststone, VLC and a looooong etc…
One gets a strange feeling when you pay your hard earned money to the richest corporations to get crippeld software.
Thanks for this interesting post. I am having my finals @ college monday about OpenSource and Brazil. I will try to point out the difference between western countries (like the Netherlands / European Union) and Brazil in the usage of Linux.
I can use a lot of information on this page, thanks for that
Tomas (from Argentina),
You are certainly an intelligent person,
although your PC has got the nasty Windoze…
But think of Mafia$oft as “something you must
get rid of as soon as possible”.
By the way, is it true that there are MUCH more
Linux users in Argentina than in Brazil?
@Joost: glad it helped
@Felix: not sure about more Linux users in .ar. Do you mean in absolute numbers or market share? Either way, I have no idea.
Thank you all for the feedback.
@Gustavo Duarte:
I’m curious about the MARKET SHARE of Linux in both Argentina and Brazil, just because somebody told me that the penguin was adopted by nearly 50% of the Argentinians… Well, I can’t believe it at all. (In ABSOLUTE NUMBERS, there should be too many more Brazilians using Linux.)
By the way, the people in your beautiful giant country seems to be very creative, thus open to new ideas!
@Felix: sorry, I don’t have the numbers. It’s hard to come up with reliable Linux usage numbers. 50% sounds sky high though.
One needs to compare with PPP. Cost of MS office (200 USD) is equal to living expenses of a month in poor countries. This is a better comparison, since people will equate the cost of acquiring a software with what they need to forgo
Also, for Linux to be a Desktop, the applications need to be named on what they do. to have wider adoption the applications names should refelect what they do..
First of all, why is there so much hatred for Microsoft (in general)? It’s not even a freaking person, but a company (70,000+ employees)! I just don’t understand, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. I mean, nobody is truly forcing one to do anything.
Secondly, I don’t think MS ever condoned piracy or even passively accepted it as a way to get more users, so I think that idea is a bit ridiculous (to say the least). Yes, they are probably too expensive (considering how much money they supposedly have), especially in Brazil (which I strongly assume somebody will rectify eventually), and yes Starter isn’t ideal, but people can always use older, cheaper Windows (e.g. 98SE). And there are many alternatives besides just Linux (e.g., see http://www.osnews.com). So piracy is never a “good thing”, even if I personally prefer freeware or FOSS stuff myself (although I do use Windows mostly).
Thirdly, market share, compatibility, price, etc … which is most important? Just use what you want, what works best, and enjoy. Sure, share your work if you’re able, that’s cool. We all like to share ideas, fixes, improvements. That’s part of the fun.
I think MS’ leadership (and others) are too “old school” in mentality, used to the old days unlike us new punks who don’t care and only want what we want. Things surely are a’changin’, that’s for sure. We all have to adapt to new things, I guess, as part of life.
Fourthly, I think things like DRM and WGA are explicitly bad if they overreach and actually harm innocent users (e.g. disabling legal content), so those things might permanently harm MS if they aren’t very careful. But Linux is unlikely to ever support some things due to this (seen as “features” for content providers). Linux is a very good alternative for most other stuff, though, as long as you have good hardware support and use a reasonable distro that pre-packages most common stuff for you.
By the way, MEPIS Linux is fantastic for newbies… It should replace Windoze in every desktop!
My personal preference is FreeBSD. My wife and I also use VectorLinux, and my son uses antiX-MEPIS, both excellent distros.
But the best tip for a Windoze refugee will always be MEPIS. No other KDE-based distro is as perfect.
Very well written article.
I’m brazilian, CS grad student and devoted to free software. Though I’m not against proprietary software, I deeply dislike Microsoft and their devious business strategies. I’m sorry all of you american-windows-lovers reading this, but that’s just how I feel. Nothing personal.
I would so love the “linux take over” to happen here, in fact I pray for it to happen, every night..
Thank you all for the feedback.
@Siva: no, PPP would yield the exact same percentages because the price of licenses would also need to be corrected.
@Rugxulo: I agree 100% on the Microsoft hate thing. I look at all multinational, publicly owned corporations in pretty much the same way: as faceless, amorphous institutions seeking to maximize profit. Some are better than others, but in general it’s really quite silly to get so emotional about them. “Hating Microsoft” or “loving Apple” or what-have-you is pointless to me.
In fact, I believe all things considered Microsoft has been a positive institution. They don’t pollute, they treat employees with respect, including women and minorities, they’ve shared a lot of wealth via stock options - in many ways they’ve been a force for good. Also, while tons of companies were chasing fat cats and trying to sell systems worth tens of thousands of dollars to large customers, they had a vision of delivering computing to the masses.
They compete aggressively, but hey, that’s what business is all about. They have done things I dislike, but all companies do. Now, Microsoft did have a certain arrogance and nastiness which came on display during the DOJ investigations and other tidbits. I don’t know, I don’t get too worked up over this stuff, but it’s not black and white.
Regarding the ‘force’ thing though, I don’t agree. Microsoft does have an effect on the tech landscape, which once looked set to be a full-blown monopoly and now is at least a very influential position. The stuff they do _does_ affect everyone, even if they don’t use MS. So on those grounds I can understand people being pissed off at them.
A lack of respect for copyright actually helps MS in Brazil. If you respect copyright and can’t afford Windows then Linux becomes your default option. If you don’t respect copyright then you suddenly have a choice. MS doesn’t mind piracy on the low end as it builds mind share.
Linux supports should be quick to condemn piracy. Copyright(left) is what gives the GPL its force.
[...] Duartes // [...]
@Gustavo Duarte:
You said ~Microsoft has been a positive institution. They don’t pollute~.
But everybody knows Mafia$oft has been the biggest enemy of fair companies like Netscape, Qualcomm, or Red Hat. Is it a positive institution, or a really nasty one?
And they generate much more waste than any other manufacturer of paper and plastic boxes containing plastic and metal CD-ROMs. Yes, ecology was never a concern in the corporate world.
By the way, I still use an old Pentium 4 2.4MHz with FreeBSD and a very old Pentium III 800MHz with Linux… What could be as ecologic as NOT buying a new computer hardware every time Mafia$oft releases a new crappy Windoze?
I agree with you in every other respect. The present article is one of the best I have always seen __ truly a must for all PC users.
Congratulations!!!
[...] os preços de software da microsoft, no brasil e nos eua, em relação ao PIB per capita, gustavo duarte mostra que uma suite de software de negócios, aqui, custa quase vinte vezes mais do que nos estados [...]
Hi. Really good article. Certain comments made by others upon it made fair arguments too.
I write in order that the person that described Linux as “crappy, might give it a go.
Microsoft experiences board on the completely miserable. “Windows needs to restart for changes to take effect.” That goes for many a Windows user too.
Yes I am a recent convert. Sabayon, Suse, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, Kurumin, Puppy, Linux Mint, Mandriva, are all products I have tried, are free from viruses, update seemlessly (if I wish them too), are graphically far more enhanced than any crappy, poorly-maintained Windows distro, with interactive support from great people that make great software that is essentially liberating for millions of people.
It has quirks, in terms of the delightful software that you can download at no cost that would be hounding me for some licensing payment, sheerly because the concept of it is “cool”.
Using Linux has opened my eyes to what computing is, and I shall be glad forever more not to return to an OS developer who lucked out to have his (sloppy) work shipped with PC’s world-wide, adding about $100 to the price of a standard PC anyone has bought in the last 15 years, when the best software I have ever used on a PC, was the damnedest up-to-date software available, developed by people who use it and develop it.
Otimo analise Gustavo, agradeço o esforço voce tem feito.
@Rugxulo
“I just don’t understand, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. I mean, nobody is truly forcing one to do anything.”
I beg to differ. To me this is like saying: Well, you don’t like to work? Hey, no one is forcing you to work. You are free. Why don’t you move to the amazon and live off berries.
It might look like no-one is forcing you to do something, but hey, we are a social beast, and no man is an island. Like someone said before, “it’s complicated”.
I’m also Brazilian, and have been leaving overseas since 2000. I am currently living in South Korea, and this happens to be one of the most Microsoft-centric countries in the developed world.
http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monoculture/
Being a Linux and FOSS lover, I have to say I have a hard time “using what I want”. Banking websites rely HEAVILY on ActiveX and on proprietary obscure security plugins that ONLY work on Windows/IE. Having lived in other countries where all you need to do banking is a browser, it truly is a pain. Most scripts on common-folk websites are also IE specific, and simply fail to work on Firefox without giving you the slightest clue on what went wrong.
When I first met my partner, a South Korean, she only knew IE. After showing her Firefox, she was amazed at how fast it was and she got hooked. However, soon enough, all sorts of problems started to creep up. She still uses Firefox for most of her browsing, but she has “learned” that whenever something doesn’t work she has to switch over to IE. And not a single day goes by that she doesnt need to use IE. She needs IE to log into her company’s website. She needs it for her banking. She needs it to do online shopping (80% of her and mine non-food shooping is done online). She needs it to get into her university’s website. And the list goes on. Most of the time that I catch a gimple of her laptop’s screen, I notice both browsers open. Which begs the question? Is it really worth bothering with FF? I guess she must really like it, or else she would have given up long time ago…
I’d love to say you are right, but thruth of the matter is, human inertia means that change takes time, and one person alone cannot change the world. And I’m not sure things will change at all, since most Koreans don’t even know there’s something else out there. And if somebody does hear about alternatives to Windows/IE, and goes throuth the effort of giving it a try, you know what happens? It doesn’t really work… So why bother…
Maybe we are back to the chicken and egg problem…
And again, “it’s complicated”.
I don’t want to get too much off topic here, but I actually believe humans need not work, and that we are just 21st century slaves. Appeareance of freedom, appeareance of prosperity, misinformation, schooling - they are all powerful tools to makes us conform to the norm. However, I do believe humans like to be productive, but that’s a long shot from the concept of work as we understand it today. Capitalism is a relatively fairly new concept, however, 99.9999% of us could not ever imagine something else… Talk about monoculture…
A Brazilian friend of mine told me that Linux is now going to replace Windows in every “Electoral Machine” of his country by a decision taken at a Federal Court. And the estimated money saving will reach the amount of TWO MILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS.
Very good news for all tax-payers in Brazil. For us Linux users around the World, one thing is too much clear: The “Final Victory” is coming!
[...] And another: [...]
[...] in the developing world are rapidly migrating to free software, a lot of focus is put on cost savings from licensing and removing the potential for liability from piracy within their [...]
[...] is een van de voorlopers als het gaat om Linux. Gustavo Duarte gaat in deze interessante blogpost in op wat volgens hem daarvan de oorzaken zijn. Een aantal opvallende [...]
Best text ever I’ve seen about technology scene in Brazil. Matou a pau!
Very interesting article. Pretty shocked to see that the price of Microsoft products is so high in Brazil. I always thought that they would do a special deal for emerging markets and sell it very cheap. I have been working with linux for almost ten years. It’s a fact that in recent years the number of south American (a lot of Brazilians) developers has grown, a good thing
[...] US, the ProInfo program launched by the government of president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva reduces dependence on costly foreign software just as the sugar ethanol program for cars reduces dependence on expensive foreign oil. The [...]
Thank you for so awesome article!
Would be great if these heavy taxes on Microsoft stuff could be as high here in european community - this would help europeans being more distant of Microsoft dirty antitrust practices.
We must not forget that, in Brazil, the abusive antitrust of ms-Windows OEM still exists as far it sadly exists in the whole world, and Linux OEM is still not that popular.
It’s really great to see Brazil seems to be very mature in this issue! Awesome!
Nice article.
My personal theory regarding the high prices of Microsoft products here in Brazil is that they would only lose money if they actually lowered the prices.
People here will only buy software if they absolutely *need* to buy it. Those who need to buy Microsoft products here in Brazil are: medium/large companies and large PC OEMs (Dell, etc). They already have the money to pay and will pay whatever Microsoft asks them to pay, because they have no other choice.
The regular user would only buy non-pirate copies if they were cheaper than the pirate copies (which sell for $1-$5). Regular people here don’t even really understand the concept of copyright - it’s not only for software, it’s for everything.
For instance, most people here don’t know it’s actually against the law to buy pirate CDs or DVDs. They think the only problem with those is that they’re of lower quality or can damage their DVD/CD players. People think that they’re paying for the media, not for the actual contents, so, for them, if someone is able to sell a CD for $1, those who are charging $10 are obviously trying to rip them off.
This is why it’s so difficult to actually sell anything legitimate here in Brazil, be it software, music, movies, etc. People will only pay only if they absolutely need to. So people only pay for subscription services or for multiplayer computer games which are CD-KEY validated (and in this last case, a lot of people will still choose to play in pirate servers).
Bottom line is: people here have a hard time paying for anything that they can’t touch - it feels like they’re being ripped off. People would actually make 10 or 20 calls lasting less than 3 seconds, trying to have long conversations, because calls are only billed after 3 seconds. This is the sort of people you’re trying to get money from when you try to sell something around here.
[...] Brazil has always appealed to me or maybe the Phillipines. [...]
[...] matter is Gandhi-Con4 has already started. Brazil, the 10th largest world economy and growing, dumped Microsoft in favor of Linux years ago in a desire for transparency and has been tickeled pink ever since. The French Army [...]