Greetings to all again. This time I come to comment on the importance of free software in Peru, which is the country where I live and I must say that here the free software panorama does not seem to be very encouraging (except Red Hat, which is at least making its pin us here and PerúLinux that supports MyPES and PyMES), since practically GNU / Linux users are completely immersed in Warez (a term used to designate proprietary software that uses patches or cracks to activate) and makes it simply be in a situation in which you cannot opt for free and / or open source software due to the dependencies it generates.
The beginning of dependency.
The beginning of the problem lies in the late 90's, when Microsoft was at its monopoly heyday, it has made many countries practically depend on Windows except for some companies.
With the passing of time and with the passing of the government of former President Alejandro Toledo Manrique, he has accepted an agreement with Microsoft to be able to provide the licenses to be installed on the PCs of all educational centers install WIndows XP Professional (If you don't believe me, take a look at the statements made by Bill Gates about that measure).
On the part of the general public, something much more serious than "piracy" was brewing: the warez market was increasing in Peru, precisely in Av. Wilson and in Jr. Paruro, where you can get this type of software stored on blank CD's / DVD's of any kind downloaded from TPB, cyberlockers such as Mega and 4shared and / or versions of Windows 8 with .BAT files or any activator that serves to "activate" the system (Apple is not saved with its OS X and its respective software designed for that system).
The actual situation
Nowadays, we are much more and more immersed in proprietary software, and to tell the truth, many of my high school classmates are surprised when they talk about GNU / Linux (they even nicknamed me "Linux" therefore talking about the distros of this system and why my marked interest in him) when I tell you about his thousand and one wonders that he has.
Companies like Red Hat and Peru Linux are promoting the business use of this system, which is gaining followers in almost all the MyPES and SMEs out there.
However, in the use of personal computers, still we remain rooted to Windows In many respects, besides, GNU / Linux distros like BackTrack and Beini are hardly used for the sole purpose of milking the internet from outside Wi-Fi networks.
What is most surprising is that the statements of Richard Stallman and the FSF about proprietary software are precisely adjusted to the reality that the country is going through, which is quite worrying that I even have 2 CD holders that 95% of them have warez, and 5% have free and / or open source software.
Moreover, most of the media that talk about technology repeat the same mantra of using proprietary software legally, knowing that in Peru it is practically impossible to pay US $ 300 for the license that costs Windows 8, US $ 900 for the entire Master Collection suite of the Adobe CS6 and bear the cost of maintaining the antivirus that, in the end, will not let us get out of the bubble created by dependence on proprietary software and by a government that does not do its part to time to bet on a truly sustainable development (hence why it makes me envious that neighboring countries like Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela bet on free and / or open source software).
Well, I hope I have clarified many things about the situation faced by free software in Peru, and that at least it has a better future than many think. See you and until the next post.
PS: I recommend that you take a look at this video about Richard Stallman on the free software in education.
Microsoft's "altruism" of facilitating or giving away the licenses of its products to schools is comparable to that of a trafficker giving away doses at the door of a school, basically it is a future investment with a high guaranteed rate of return ...
You're right about that. What's more, so far I have the disc that they gave me of Visual Studio 2008 Express that they gave me, with tutorials and more.
Anyway, I am already using Debian at home (and by the way, Windows Vista because Windows XP and Server 2003 will run out of extended support and I am already manually installing updates to that Windows to avoid problems for posteriori) and there are not many people I know (truth be told, one who is my former partner who is using Ubuntu 13.04) who are using GNU / Linux in my country.
The Windows Vista thing is because unfortunately they all work with proprietary software (more than anything, warez) and because EVERYONE works with the MS OFFICE format and when they save in Office Open Document, Office always saves something additional that does not runs fine in LibreOffice 4 (LibreOffice performs better than Kingston Office for Linux so far when it comes to editing the Office Open Document for now).
I don't think that the practice of giving away licenses is immoral, unlike other more monopolistic practices. After all, there are free alternatives and it is the institutions that choose and those that should value the dependency it creates. Another thing is that I believe that a company should not be profited from the public sphere and in case of doing so it should be with fair competition.
In any case it is clear that it is not altruism.
I do consider it immoral, because they hide behind a supposed altruism (very profitable by the way, when deducting taxes), as supposed aid to education, when what they are doing is guaranteeing that students become future consumers of their products ; ah! And regarding the possibility of the institutions to choose, it is known that there has been more than one scandal due to the way in which these "decisions" have been bought with contributions and donations to the institutions and even bribes to officials, so it is better not to touch the theme.
Exact.
hello… they are a company, they do nothing for nothing…, in this case it is a great marketing strategy.
Apple and MS do it the same, although those of the block focus more on the gringo "market".
Now they need to learn OpenBSD and change the kernel that comes in OSX and it would already be "patched" to "avoid more bugs".
Errata: the link that makes references to RMS, is http://es.windows7ins.org/, http://es.windows7sing.org/. Sorry for the inconvenience caused by editing in WordPress for Android.
Sorry, http://es.windows7sins.org/
What a surprise, I am Peruvian and also the weirdo who uses Linux at home. However, I believe that at any moment Unix systems will take the place of Windows. They already do it in Europe, and if you tell them around here, that in Germany, for example, the public administration has migrated to Linux then they pay attention to you, since around here we are very inclined to give greater importance to abroad.
For me, the platform of the future is Unix systems, whether they are proprietary or not. I do not share the fanaticism of Open Source, I do not agree with Stallman and the GPL licenses. Rather I lean towards the BSD. My base system now is Linux, LibreOffice, and many more.
What a surprise that I meet compatriots on this blog!
Regarding the adoption of UNIX systems, the future looks bright, as long as educational institutions are encouraged to use Unix-like systems such as GNU / Linux or BSD and dedicate themselves to training students.
As for the GPL license, it fails more than anything in freedom 3, since there is no true will and it forces you to make your software to be part of the common good. Instead, licenses like BSD, MIT, and / or Apache give you that freedom of whether or not to profit from your license. The FSF is already a disgrace, since it has had the reprehensible episode of the GNU / Hurd kernel vaporware, a project of so many that have been forgotten. Other projects like gnash do not even outperform its proprietary counterpart (Adobe Flash) and I have not seen so far that the GNU project has released an equivalent of Adobe's .fla file editor.
@ eliotime3000
Just like the rest of Latin America ???
It may be that in some places there is more awareness than in others, especially at the company level, but with regard to the general public, the pattern you describe is repeated throughout Latin America.
offtopic:
Do you have any idea when the next CentOS 7 comes out or if there is already a fairly stable beta version to install on a home server and start testing it?
Responding to the off topic, I doubt that CentOS will be released this year, since in November of this year RHEL 7 would only be released (I went to RHN and the ISO's were still in beta).
Returning to the point, the problem is mainly that the government of my country is already absolutely tied to Microsoft. Hardly, private companies give due interest to Linux and the occasional PC that is sold has at least Ubuntu, Fedora and / or Debian (the latter is like finding a needle in a haystack).
It is practically the same in all of Latin America. And yes, there are some projects like Canaima and Huayra but ... do they really have enough support and / or promotion so that free software is more widely used? Anyway, Windows (official and pirated) and other proprietary software are still being used to a greater extent than free.
But here practically NOTHING is done by the government and / or the media to promote free software. Here we have Av. Wilson which is warez's paradise, although sometimes, looking well, you may find distros such as Debian, Slackware, CentOS / RHEL and more.
There are television programs that have covered the subject in the most vague way possible, but there are news reports (such as ATV News) that are really pitiful >> http://www.tuteve.tv/noticia/actualidad/96762/2012/09/14/informe-especial–avenida-wilson-el-paraiso-del-software-pirata
I know Canaima only by name.
Huayra in the current state is A SHAME, it is nothing more than Debian with GNOME Shell 3.2 or 3.4 rebranded>: /
The worst of all is that if the distribution is developed in the same way in which the rest of the things are done in Argentina, surely the distribution of SL will end up costing us per-capita more expensive than if Windows licenses were paid or directly equated with Macs to the public administration.
that doesn't sound very objective
Both Canaima and Huayra are chauvinistic versions of Debian whose only difference is rebranding. Let's see if the Cuban distro Nova is encouraged to give more documentation of its distro to be able to test it (by the way, I download the Trisquel).
That is less objective still
Your two comments are much less objective.
If Sunat made PDT's for Linux and graphical environments like KDE, XFCE and GNOME (minimum)… I think there would be more followers to be part of this Operating System.
If there were "strong" applications for construction needs (strong competition from AUTOCAD), graphic design, others ... then there would be "strong" reasons to use Linux.
UFFFF ... Imagine that ALL the servers that the government has in its ministries and in the Banco de la Nación used Linux, there would not be so many problems with the connectivity of the servers nor would there be so many cloning of pages to scam people through the pages website of the banks that we have here.
As for "strong applications," there are. In the case of Blender, it is the application that has surpassed even 3D Studio Max and AutoCAD in terms of 3D quality (from movies like the original version of "Spider-Man" to shorts like the well-known "Big Buck Bunny" have used that software). Others, like Krita, are good, but their diffusion is not as intensive as that of GIMP, but in itself its interface is similar to that of Photoshop and the illustrations can be printed without any problem. In the field of audio, applications such as Ardor and Mixxx are those that are at the level of applications such as Ableton Live !, FL Studio and / or Virtual DJ.
The sale of pirated software is very common, as most people have become used to having it around at a very cheap price. Also that the media and the environment help Windows to be so expanded, although now the fashion is smartphones.
Well, it is not surprising that Microsoft "gives" left and right copies and product keys, already here in Costa Rica there are institutions of both higher education and colleges that have agreements with M $, giving away keys and products for life to their members ... what ordinary person would reject that? Well, like us, few.
I think that the stability, security and usability of Debian would be light years away from the last version of Win on each computer, since for what it is mostly used I do not see differences, but well described by the colleagues, we give away, incidentally we evade some taxes by here and there, and we create loyalty in users ...
I think the efforts of some people help, but I have not seen much change in that "faithfulness." It's a shame to see that even the same institutions speak of Free Software Communities and every general purpose machine is from Win.
Greetings.
When I was studying in high school, I remember that Microsoft came and gave me a Visual Studio 2008 Express DVD with tutorials and everything. What's more, I have it so far.
Obviously, Debian is light years away from Windows in stability, and it is obviously available on almost every computer platform out there.
As for the hypocrisy of the promotion of free software on the part of educational institutions, it is quite frequent in these parts. Hopefully they at least realize that free software is much easier to adapt to their needs than proprietary software.
Yes, in fact, in my current institution (university) agreements with M $ are in process so that students of Systems Engineering give us software keys (Windows 7/8, VS, SQL Enterprise Manager ...) and in The case of OS is a key for life, according to what they say ... how hypocritical they are when launching this past Monday the new initiative of Free Software for the university in conjunction with graduate and undergraduate students. It makes me sad, because so much freedom is being proclaimed and seeing that it will be M $ who ends up laughing and continuing with his monopoly.
Too bad countries and institutions give with all this, I can't imagine how great it would be to use free technologies throughout an institution, using free standards for work and so on ... very utopian, I think.
Greetings.
Hello, here another compatriot, and weird bug XD.
I think we can only have faith in "Flisol", I have been sadly unable to attend for one reason or another, but in the photos they have I have been able to observe that a number of people attend regularly.
In universities it is also intended, in my faculty there are at least 4 computers with ubuntu.
We are progressing at a snail's pace, but ten years ago the word linux was not even heard.
Regarding having a national OS, I have read about Canaima and Huayra but they do not have much acceptance because it does not differ from their mother system. If they wanted to promote an OS the main thing would be Debian + KDE. or kubuntu, or xubuntu, because if you put Unity on them it would be very shocking.
What luck you are, Mika_Seido, but as I remember, when I was preparing at ADUNI I also saw three years ago that Windows XP on PC's was replaced by Ubuntu and Debian Lenny. Obviously, if teachers cannot be properly trained about the GNU / Linux universe, they would obviously advance at a snail's pace. With the case of ADUNI, previous training was given and the result was spectacular.
As for a national distro, it would not be quite convenient (note that Canaima and Huayra are mere Debian rebrandings and no free software made in the country of origin has been added), since a database would have to be set up on the servers of the Peruvian Scientific Network, and then hire people to maintain the repos. It would be more convenient to call the Linux Foundation or Richard Stallman for advice and training to avoid problems of being branded as chauvinists and manipulators.
Oh, and let me clarify that this photo is from my records that I have. Above, the CentOS; In the center, Debian 7, a utility CD, and a Windows 98 SE OEM disc; below, the beta of Driver Pack Solution 12 and Driver Pack Solution 12.3. And I'm using Debian 7 Wheezy, but it is dual-boot with Windows Vista to be able to edit and / or work with proprietary software (Windows 7 has a disastrous task dock, and Windows XP will soon run out of extended support; let alone Windows 8 which is ultra heavy).
Also, I realize that there are few girls who are in the world of free software. I am happy to know that there are girls who are interested in this world of GNU / Linux.
As for a national distro, it would not be quite convenient (note that Canaima and Huayra are mere Debian rebrandings... []
I say that, read my post well. Well, maybe it is not understood, but I wanted to get to that very thing.
Ah good. My apologies for not paying good attention to your comment.
Greetings community.
Here in Mexico there is also this warez thing, let's say shameless, and of those who study computer science, only some of us use Linux at home.
There is still a long way to go before Linux really starts to "show itself" among common users, there is still a long way to go, but events like flisol are a good pretext for it.
(And now that in Mexico the public education secretariat intends to give children laptops with linux inside, we will have to wait for the reaction / acceptance of it.)
Now, in my very personal opinion, I think that a single day for flisol is really a short time because it could be celebrated for two or perhaps three days, and even find a way to celebrate it in a somewhat more open / public place like inside a shopping plaza. for example.
Today flisol has steam as a pretext to show Linux games, which is what many children and young people look for, without forgetting to show wine running win32 applications.
What's more, in the forum desdelinux, a post could be created to create brainstorming on how to make free software more disseminated.
(hahaha ... and thus spread the word in the name of father stallman and son torvalds ... hahahaha)
Quack!
I hope the server running this site doesn't get saturated with so much brainstorming. Remember that this website is hosted in Cuba and the admins manage to manage the site.
disastrous the situation in Peru
But RedHat is not free, it contains binary blobs in its kernel and some proprietary packages.
Don't you know that there is a freer version called CentOS? You don't necessarily have to depend on RHEL, since there are always alternatives like CentOS.
It is not very true that the advancement of free software in our country, Peru, is a disaster, it is a fairly limited opinion, in work environments, not educational, the issue is taking shape and free software is being used, it is true, it is missing much. But here is the bottom line, if we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem. What do we do using and distributing pirated software as IT administrators? The solution is not to attack or blame a software company, the solution is to change habits, to stop being informal and many more.
Thank you
That's why I put the image of my albums, which are mostly warez. Now I am using a Windows Vista dual boot with Debian Wheezy (sorry if I write from Windows but unfortunately I am doing a job in which it forces me to use proprietary software to present a task that I was given in high school).
Also, while Microsoft is not the only one to do these kinds of tactics, it has been the pioneer in doing this kind of practice. In addition, it has discarded many projects that could have a good future (such as the webTV that died at the hands of Microsoft and other similar products such as Smart TV and Apple TV have resurrected the idea) and has made some standards proprietary, such as the standard web (although I remember web pages that were only compatible with Internet Explorer for a long time).
Adobe has also monopolized its standards in terms of graphic design (see Adobe RGB), but there are other standards such as PANTONE used in software such as Inkscape or Krita, which are free open source software.
this made me think here in venezuela, where almost everything has windows, but unless it is a computer that brings a license, it is installed from a pirate cd bought from a peddler (fuck micromie ..).
We are in the same, since mostly in Peru the warez trade has developed a lot and both we and the government have allowed free software to be put aside and to give priority to proprietary software.
Here in Ecuador a company uses Ret Hat for its supermarket with server and terminals
Although Red Hat has proprietary blobs, the company that develops the operating system is the one that contributed the most to the development of the Linux kernel, in addition to being the one that has developed the package management software called Synaptic that is found in all the distros out there. . Even the subscription that Red Hat gives in my country is much more accessible than a Windows Server 2012 license.
Synaptic! ?? Yuuuckkk !!!
Luckily it is not in all, rather in all Debian-based.
Ajjjjj !!!
Believe it or not, it is also in Debian (thank goodness it doesn't come when it's just netinstall or you just want to install the software-center).
Anyway, I prefer to use the aptitude and / or the software-center, although it is tied to the synaptic, unfortunately.
I suppose it means that it is only in the .deb distro and maybe in PCLinuxOS, in openSUSE there is Yast2 and in Mageia / Mandriva / Rosa RPMDrake.
@ sieg84:
Ah good. And to think that RHEL / CentOS and Fedora are still using Synaptic now.
@ eliotime3000
Who would say, is still on Fedora 19.
@ sieg84:
HAHAHAJAAAA !!!
The story about the dependency on something is very good (not to say much, it affects the use of Linux in Peru)
But I think it also depends on the ability to motivate users to switch to Linux for example:
Does any university professor recommend using scientific libraries in Linux to supplant Matlab? Do some design institutes use GIMP or Inkscape? As an end user, do you know how easy it is to use word processors, photo and document organizers, etc etc in Linux?
The answer in many cases will probably be NO. We could start there.
I mean, it is of little use to give Linux talks to university students when the professors will tell them: come on use matlba ("so hack it")… Maybe we should teach the professors how easy it is to use Ubuntu, Debian. It is not a question of which distro is better or worse, more or less stable. It is a matter of functionality, it helps me to do computer vision, program in python, write in latex, simulate robots, manage my photos, watch online TV ... (I use Fedora, Mandriva and now I use Ubuntu) ... simply because it works for me and it is more useful to me than Windows.
I do not plan to spend hours / days installing libraries in windows when in Ubuntu I can do it automatically from the software center. I don't plan to use matlab (heavy and I don't have the license), I prefer to use python and the scientific libraries to design according to my own needs
Let's change the chip, if you can!
regards
I also use Linux for the convenience it generates for me when doing this type of library installation. On many occasions, I find it to be much faster than in Windows when it comes to doing common tasks and its background processes are very well developed to such a level that they do not affect the performance of the CPU.
Greetings to all!!!. My respects, eliotime3000. Speaking of matlab and others, years ago, I think it was around 2007, I taught a nephew of mine, a mathematician for others, the program octave, and that was enough for me to switch from Windows to Debian Etch. Since then, it uses Linux. I think it's running ArchLinux now. And in the Wheezy repo, you also find free mat, "Mathematics framework (mostly matlab compatible)". It is not at all my specialty, but reading it verifies that there is to choose. Take the Synaptic and search by Description and name, matlab.
Hola a tod @ s!
Yes, it is true there is to choose. To continue with Matlab, we could also add Scilab, which also has an environment similar to simulink (scicos) and even has compatibility to interpret code in Matlab, it is also maintained by Inria (nstitut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique - France). And about Octave, simply a marvel, it is also used by those from Stanford University to give classes on Machine Learning (Machine learning -online, Artificial Intelligence)…. Talking a little more about artificial intelligence we have: Scikit-learn (machine learning in Python), OpenCv (computer vision). With python you can also use matplot, scipy, mayavi for computer vision… .pyrobot (for robotics). And for the common and wild users: Radio tray (listen to radios online), VLC (for me the best video player), Caliber (for epub books that you "buy online"), Darktable (raw photo editor, for people with the soul of a professional photographer, just a soul) ... Maybe something that can help students get organized:
LibreOffice + Mendeley Desktop. Simply the combination is fantastic. With Mendeley you organize your documents, it has a plugin that will allow you to create references when you need to present a written work and with just a couple of clicks, if you use LaTex (I recommend Texstudio or Texmaker, Mendeley can import the references in bibtex format ... just fantastic)
Greetings to all and let's continue learning and enjoying the advantages of Linux (I say this as a user in learning 🙂).
PS: It wouldn't be nice if everything I say is wonderful about Linux. I still have to switch to Windows to be able to use Webex Meetings (to listen to video conferences): S
Thanks for the compliments, Fico. In addition, many of the applications that are used the most in the academic world (especially in the mathematical and scientific field), are more than satisfied.
Now, wait for me a while to finish doing an "update" to this Windows.
Yes now. It only asked me to restart so that it would leave my CPU alone and thus be able to "update" a component that it asked me to (and I already installed most of the updates that the blessed Windows asked me).
an article by a compatriot and comments from several around here, interesting 🙂
but I must note that you are quite young because you speak since the 90s only
the Peruvian computer reality began in the 80s, with the overwhelming piracy that occurred since that time and made us not aware of what software license is.
I read there, "imagine that government servers used Linux" and I would recommend that you take a tour of the web pages of the INEI and the ONGEI, government entities that annually carry out a survey on computer resources in the Peruvian state , which indicates that approximately 70% of servers in the Peruvian state are Linux, approximately 20% Windows and 10% old Unix or AS / 400 that refuse to die.
the case of the "agreement" with Microsoft made by Toledo is complex and actually ridiculous, there was NEVER such an agreement, there was talk of 50 million dollars that Microsoft would invest in Peru. The reality was that Microsoft agreed to provide training to Peruvian teachers as part of the Huascaran project of that government and injected 50 million dollars to Microsoft Peru.
That did not prevent the use of free software at the server level in the Peruvian state from increasing from 20% to 55%, for that reason? simply because it works, it covers the needs and there were professionals in the state who knew and handled it.
the next government did nothing about free software in the state and what is worse, it produced a ridiculous austerity law that what it did was make good professionals go to private when they saw their salaries reduced and go to the private. At an educational level, the Huascaran of the previous government was just smoke and the OLPC thing was a complete fiasco.
This problem is not only a problem of use or non-use of free software in Peru, but also a PROFESSIONAL problem, our universities and institutes only form packets. Many of us who use Linux learn a lot in a self-taught way and that type of technical knowledge is not measurable in Peru, jobs are given here to those who present more cards, not more jobs.
and our local industry lacks maturity, during 2007, 2008, 2009 I remember many companies involved in free software (Sinux, ConsultoriaNet, Computer Doctor, Novelix, etc.) but I also remember that at those times the local market was cannibalized, added to a lot freelancer who threw himself to the ground in the price, did a bad job and that in the end ended in a "free software is useless." Now many of those companies either closed or switched to proprietary software. In addition to those that free software serves, there it is, working, they are not in need of support at all times as it would be with other platforms. But locally we do not have enough companies or professionals to support a market and even more to defend it. Suppose the scenario that a law of mandatory use of free software in the state was given, my appreciation is that currently there are not enough professionals or companies working on free software to assimilate this migration.
Somoslibres.org, is Peruvian and promotes and disseminates free software since 1996 we have even developed a Peruvian distribution http://tumix.softwarelibre.org.pe