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Now that the dish is prepared, is very easy for people to eat it. But to prepare this dish was not a joke. I remember the first meeting we had, at Granja do Torto, which I understood absolutely nothing of this language that this people were deciding, and that was a huge tension between those…

My recent visit to Brazil was a wonderful validation of the belief that I’ve held for more than 20 years: if you give people a better way to do things, they’ll do better things. The Brazilian government continues to expand its adoption of open source, both across more and more ministries and deeper within each…

Yesterday I had a chance to meet the lead singer of O Teatro Magico and then see their show. It was amazing! This creative group of musicians were about to “live the dream” by signing with a record company a number of years ago, but after they recorded the songs for their first album, the…

There’s a lot of good news that does not always reach me at my desk in a single hop. But when I travel around the world, the good news of the region I’m visiting has a way of finding me, such as the news that the ITU has bestowed the World Telecommunication and Information Society…

I’ve heard a lot of arguments against software patents (SWPAT) since Richard Stallman first raised the flag at the League for Programming Freedom, and almost all of the arguments are variations on a theme. A valid theme, but a theme that, after 20 years, has become a bit monotonous. Herman Daly puts that theme in…

According to a feature article in Federal Computer Weekly, the Obama Administration’s new CIO Vivek Kundra has specifically called out open source as one of the key technology initiatives he will support to make the government work better at a lower cost (and with greater transparency). But the article continues to point out what seem…

Launched on the eve of his birthday, the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) and the Advanced Information Technology Institute of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE), have decided to join forces with the Sohne family to establish a Fellowship in memory and honour of the great work…

Michele Boldrin of Washington University in St. Louis talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about intellectual property and Boldrin’s book, co-written with David Levine, Against Intellectual Property. Boldrin argues that copyright and patent are used by the politically powerful to maintain monopoly profits. He argues that the incentive effects that have been used to justify…

The story of “Let’s Do It!” is both a story of civic triumph and a validation of open source software technology. But like the successful campaign of Barack Obama, the story of the actual open source software used is far less important and far less interesting than the story of how much the principles of…

A special report from CNNMoney.com quotes Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney saying “As antitrust enforcers, we can no longer sit on the sidelines.” It’s about time! As many of you know, I was a witness in the Microsoft antitrust remedy trial of 2001, and one of the specific abuses to which I testified was my…