Brazilian challenged Microsoft and became a symbol abroad – 01/11/2024 – Tec

Brazil is cited by intellectuals critical of big tech (technology giants such as Google and Meta) as a country historically more resistant to the lobbying of these corporate giants than the United States.

At the base of this image are data protection legislation, the PL’s discussion of fake news and also the story of a public servant from the first Lula government who challenged Microsoft — a company that, this Thursday, overtook Apple and became the company of highest value in the world.

The character often cited by experts is Sergio Amadeu, who between 2003 and 2005 presided over the body responsible for the government’s digital certification processes, the ITI (National Institute of Information Technology), linked to the Civil House. Professor at UFABC (Federal University of ABC, in São Paulo), he does not participate in the current government.

In 2004, Amadeu refused licenses for a limited version of Windows offered by Microsoft to the PC Conectado social program, which aimed to facilitate access to computers for the lower middle class.

“I said no because Microsoft has the business model of a drug dealer: they only give the first dose for free; after the person is addicted, they charge a fortune”, says Amadeu.

A similar statement he made in 2004 to Carta Capital magazine ended up earning him a legal notice requesting explanations, filed by the American corporation.

The repercussion was such that the story ended up in major foreign newspapers like the New York Times and reached American intellectuals critical of the technology monopoly.

The legacy of Amadeu’s work in the early 2000s goes beyond, however, the PC Conectado controversy. The then president of ITI encouraged the adoption of the free and open operating system Linux and consolidated the bases for the adoption of freely licensed programs by the Brazilian State, in what came to be called public software.

These programs allow, under their license, the execution, modification and distribution of copies freely.

The system that makes Pix work today, for example, used open source and runs on Linux computers. The Mozilla Firefox browser, the WordPress website editor and the Python programming language are some of the open source software that can be edited and used by anyone who wants.

Public software began to be adopted at ITI and Serpro, a public information technology company that develops systems used by the federal government.

“At that time, we were behind, because those who work with programming generally use free software and 66% of Serpro’s people were still on Windows”, says Amadeu. “NASA will not put proprietary software on a spacecraft, because there is neither control nor security for this”, he adds.

To prevent large companies from accessing US presidential data, the White House also does not use proprietary software.

This debate has once again gained relevance with the consolidation of the six trillion-dollar companies that command the technology market: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia. They are all Americans.

Writer Cory Doctorow, author of the recent “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation” (still untranslated into Portuguese), sees Amadeu’s attitude as evidence that Brazil has public officials capable of resisting corporate lobbying. big techs.

“Brazilians must be alert and demand that legislators resist technological-imperialist bullying and insist on locally appropriate technological solutions,” said Doctorow.

Writer Douglas Rushkoff —who came to Brazil as part of the Frontiers of Thought conference series—mentioned Amadeu’s defense of the development of local technologies as a counterpoint to the attempts of developing countries to copy the American model.

“There are other ways than venture capital to develop technology. This way will exploit people, leave few employees and generate unhappiness; in addition, these companies should not be able to compete with North American companies,” he said.

The ITI team’s plans, however, met resistance from technology multinationals and members of the Lula government itself.

According to Amadeu, the opposition of Antonio Palocci (Finance) and Luiz Fernando Furlan (Development, Industry and Foreign Trade) prevented the public software policy from becoming law or decree.

“It was supposed to be an internal decree determining the use of free software, which would make the Court of Auditors follow this logic”, says Amadeu. “Furlan and Palocci knew this and did not allow it to be approved internally at all.”

The solution was to issue an ordinance that prioritized “permissive use licenses” — a legal solution proposed by Ronaldo Lemos, columnist for Sheet who, at the time, ran the Creative Commons entity, whose objective was to find alternatives to copyright to make access to knowledge cheaper.

“It was as if we did a double act; as a law professor I created the legal bases so that free software could be used in public administration”, says Lemos.

The manager who wanted to use paid software could refuse the recommendation, as long as he presented technical reasons for doing so.

Criticism of ITI management gained more public attention when Amadeu’s team pushed for PC Conectado machines to prioritize free software, such as the Linux operating system and Libre Office — an alternative to Microsoft’s Office package. These programs are free but have a tougher learning curve.

In competition, the American company offered licenses for Windows Essentials — a limited version of Windows that included access to email, Microsoft Messenger and blogging and parental control tools. The licenses would be free, but the operating system did not offer support for a number of programs and required the installation of a paid Windows license.

All spheres of government and the educational area represented 6% of Microsoft’s business in Brazil.

As the offer was rejected by Amadeu, the company founded by billionaire Bill Gates, in addition to notifying him legally, told the press: “We offered billions of dollars in free software to Brazilians and this bureaucrat said no.”

Wanted by Sheetthe then president of Microsoft Brazil, Emílio Umeoka, refused to comment on the case because he left Microsoft more than 15 years ago.

At the time, he criticized the ITI president’s decision to give preference to free software. “Amadeu’s stance is ideological, in the sense that he only has one solution for all solutions,” said Umeoka in an interview in 2004.

In the same year, the former president of Microsoft assessed that Brazil would not be able to maintain an export model selling free software, as the product does not create revenue for the developer.

In April 2005, minister Luiz Fernando Furlan blamed defenders of free software for the delay in the launch of PC Conectado, scheduled for 2004. “It seems strange that a country that is advancing as it is today in software production can discriminate against proprietary software” , said Furlan in a 2005 interview with Valor Econômico.

When contacted by the report, the former minister declined to comment on the matter.

The program ended up leaving the drawing board on June 26, 2005, with subsidized interest financing for computers worth R$1,400, equipped with free software.

Amadeu, however, could not resist the dispute and resigned as president of the ITI that same month, in a letter delivered to Dilma Rousseff, who had taken over the Civil House in place of José Dirceu.

Amadeu’s departure from ITI was confirmed in August 2005 and the free software policy was dismantled.

Lemos says, on the one hand, that work with open source continued behind the scenes in the government and in civil society, with less projection. “Today, free software is much bigger than it ever was.”

He cites GitHub, an open source repository. This platform became so big that Microsoft decided to buy it under the commitment of maintaining free access to the public.

Today, the debate is centered on open data and communication between platforms — interoperability, according to Lemos.

On the other hand, Amadeu states that a large part of the Brazilian government’s systems are developed in partnership with multinationals.

He cites the SouGov.br application, which brings together several government services on a platform based on IBM’s Watson chatbot. “SouGov.br’s terms of use allow IBM to capture data from Brazilians and federal servers to train artificial intelligence,” he says.

“The National Data Protection Agency does not even deign to analyze the hosting of data from government members in a country with legislation incompatible with the LGPD”, adds Amadeu. IBM processes the information it collects in data centers in the United States, where there is no data protection legislation.