Re: [OT] Re: South American Software Development

["Fabio Mascarenhas" <mascarenhas@...>]

On Jan 30, 2008 8:07 PM, John Devlin <jdevlin.lists@mac.com> wrote:

Another was the economic policies that helped create that pool of
talent:

"'From 1977 until 1992, Brazil had a policy of strong trade barriers
(called a 'market reserve') for computer hardware and software
motivated by a nationalistic feeling that Brazil could and should
produce its own hardware and software. In that atmosphere, [our]
clients could not afford, either politically or financially, to buy
customized software from abroad'... Like in 1987, when Brazil banned
MS-DOS. Or when, in 2005, Brazil announced that it was switching
300,000 government computers from Windows to open-source software like
Linux, dropping all proprietary software ... Past protectionist
policies in Brazil, now more or less abandoned, nevertheless led to
today's self-supporting and well-educated community of knowledgeable
software developers."

This is *very* debatable, and may be due to bias from other sources of the article. Take it with a huge grain of salt. It is more likely that this delayed the formation of this self-supporting and well-educated community, instead of leading to it.
 

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Fabio Mascarenhas