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by Carlos Villela.
Original Post: More about the state of Brazilian software industry
Feed Title: That's sooo '82!
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Feed Description: Carlos Villela's weblog. Everyday life, everyday software development, everyday musings.
Wow, seems like the collective soul is in synch... just when I was
getting interested in brazilian software economy and dynamics, and
started to read some reports and information around the net, slashdot announces that the
brazilian government held the "Legislative Free Software Week",
an event whose sole purpouse was to lobby ministers, governors and
deputies into free and opensource software, and one of the greatly
expected announcements was that the gov't is not renewing their
Microsoft Office licenses (switching to OpenOffice, maybe?). Great to
see such movements around here, and I must say I'm proud of being a
Brazilian even more now... one thing less to bitch about in this
country :D
Okay, back to the numbers. Remember yesterday I talked about an
imminent catastrophy in brazilian software economics. Now the picture
gets even worse if you're a pessimist: In 2001, roughly 55 thousand or
more jobs were created, but we had less than half newly graduated
students in the area that year: only 24 thousand. If you consider that
now the government is unveiling plans to stop using Microsoft or
proprietary software, and open up the source all of it's own software
currently running, we'll have a shitload of job offers, but no talents
available in the market. By the simple law of supply and demand, this
is going to create a huge problem: prices will go up to the
stratosphere, and opportunists will win millionaire, even billionaire
contracts with the government to provide open source software
solutions. Of course, given they're opportunists, the actual workers
being employed on the task will be forced to accept ridiculous wages,
and then all the benefits of using and developing only open source
software solutions to shape up the economy get all fucked up.
Being a bit more optimistic, this is a great thing. Given that the
government acts wisely in this regard, the money otherwise spent on
licenses will be spent on education, training and actually developing
already existent talents to increase the workforce and thus balance the
supply and demand. Let's hope they do it right this time. I'm leftist -
but no communist or socialist or anything, I couldn't ever say I'm no
capitalist - and I believe the gov't will do its best to do things
right, as this is the first leftist government we have in our history,
and people are all excited to do things the right way (someone please
slap me for this lousy pun).
As if this post wasn't controversial enough, expect the government to
deny any and all uses of Java technology, unless someone comes up with
a decent, open source JVM real fast. Otherwise, I think they'll be
using Mono, Python, Ruby or similar alternatives. Python is getting
really hot in Rio Grande do Sul (the southernmost state in Brazil),
where open source incentive laws are already in place, and it's great
to see a lot of brazilian Python, Zope and Plone developers building
awesome things on the systems the state develops. I'm a little
bit scared of what this holds for Java, though. I'm OK to use another
language, but I'd really miss the Java platform - APIs, projects,
patterns, and everything else... hopefully, Sun, IBM (who provides a
hefty load of products and services for the government) can work out a
license that enables Java in an opensource-only environment. One can
only hope... and re-learn Python and take a better look at Mono in the process
;)
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