One of the highlights of fisl9.0 for me was getting to know better the work that is being done by Brazil's Ministry of Education (MEC). They have just unveiled the numbers for the ongoing ProInfo project. What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools.

I seriously don’t understand why schools don’t do this. If your school needs a PC lab, buy a whole bunch of Pentium 3 computers (or even Pentium 2) and run Ubuntu. It comes with almost everything a school computer needs. Kids in public school won’t know how to modify the system in any way and its completely safe to use.

In August, we wrote about the Law Project from Senator Azeredo (PSDB) in Brazil that will restrict the freedom of internet users in Brazil.

A public, Congressional hearing about the current Brazilian data retention bill will happen on November 13th, 2008 after months of political pressure by the civil society, especially the Brazilian free software movement.

Continuing our series of bringing information about the free software movement in Latin America to English readers, North by South interviewed Cláudio Filho (original in Portuguese), one of the people responsible for starting the OpenOffice.org project in Brazil (pt-BR), known in the country as BrOffice.org.

Last school year, I worked as a technology coordinator for a rural high school in Illinois. In an attempt to save the school some money, I introduced OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Linux was also installed on a few desktop PCs and a couple of servers. Ubuntu was the Linux distribution selected.

The citizens of Serrana, Brazil, are not waiting around for Intel or Nicholas Negroponte to deliver low-cost PCs to their school children. Instead, they're taking the matter into their own hands.

"...Science, technology and social and economic interests are profoundly intertwined today, interacting and mutually influencing one another. Many movements that are struggling for changes now recognize that, unless these issues are taken up by many and various groups of citizens, it will not be possible to deal with the challenges of our times.

The Brazilian National Support Project for Telecentros (public computer labs with free, public Internet access) intends to support the deployment of 2 - 3,000 new Telecentros and towards achieving the goal of 10,000 active Telecentros by the year 2010. Almost all of the Telecentros are built using entirely free and open source software.

"A proposed new law that restricts the freedom internet use in Brazil has already passed the Senate and is dangerously close to going on the books [...] The Free Software movement from Brazil is striking up against this project and they have a petition online against it.