brazil explores sa open source push
11 June 2008

ApexBrasil director Mauricio Borges says his country has grown to be the world's 10th largest economy in 15 years and has built an ICT industry to match. Borges says Brazil now wants to internationalise that industry and sees IBSA partner SA as the natural choice.  IBSA is a trilateral political and economic framework involving SA, India and Brazil. ApexBrasil is a Brazilian federal government agency tasked with international industrial cooperation.

Borges and a slew of Brazilian businesses recently visited SA for a series of business-to-business meetings to explore possibilities.  “Software is very interesting in Brazil,” says Borges. “In the 1990s, it was very difficult to import software and even Microsoft had little market share. When we imported enterprise software, it did not work in Brazil because our fiscal and tax system was too complicated.

“Brazil has about 400 and something taxes, so nothing from outside would fit. So we had to develop software ourselves. Today, we have fantastic public administration open source software, which is more viable and economical. It was custom-made for Brazil, but adapts well to other developing countries.”
Borges says the software comes in a variety of languages. The original was in Portuguese, but software exported to Mexico has been translated into Spanish.

Software cooperation with SA would be in English, say Borges and Softex international business manager José Carlos Cusnir. Softex is the representative body of Brazil's software industry.  Government last month gave vendors until 20 June to tender for six e-government programmes that it sees as “catalytic” for its drive to automate 100 services by the year 2014.

Leon Engelbrecht,  www.itweb.co.za