The Cuban government has launched its own version of Gentoo Linux, dubbed "Nova." The distribution was developed in response to embargo hassles in updating and acquiring Windows, as well as concerns over U.S. government spying via the OS, says an industry report.

A story about Cuba’s Linux distribution, Nova, has been in the top ten most popular articles all day on Reuters and has received attention all over the tech industry press. The Cuban government announced the release of the Linux distro at this year’s International Conference on Communications and Technology in Havana.

NovaTux is the first open source video game to be released by Cuba’s vibrant free software community. The work was done by students of UCI, one of the most important computer science universities in Cuba, which also launched Nova, the first GNU/Linux distribution from the country.

I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova. Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA.

Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island's battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony.

"This is an interesting interview with a professor involved in the Cuban free software movement. He makes an interesting argument which is that the free as in price argument is not a compelling argument for Cuba to switch to free software. Because of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, in the past, their government and universities have used pirated, unlicensed proprietary software by default.

Cuba's government is trying to shake off the yoke of at least one capitalist empire —Microsoft— by joining with socialist Venezuela in a program to convert its computers to open-source "free" software.

It’s a measure aimed at breaking the dependence on programs that are under the control of US owners and also anticipating any claims by the patent’s owners for the use of this system in Cuba.

"About a year ago, we had spoken with Richard Stallman about the free software movement in Latin America and he said something which was surprising: even though free software was extremely popular in Cuba, it was receiving heavy resistance from Cuban academics and the university system in Cuba. Well, an announcement this week indicates that this has finally changed: ..."