posted by weildish on Thu 12th Feb 2009 04:43 UTC
Cuba recently launched its own answer to Windows this week, or, in the bigger picture, what the Cubans are calling "US Hegemony." Nova, the new open source OS being offered by the Cuban government, is being made to boot out US-based Microsoft products.The government of Cuba, following in a round-about way the footsteps of Russia and China, wishes to oust Microsoft products for several reasons, the most prominent of those being that Microsoft is US-based and they therefore fear that US security agencies have access to Microsoft code, also that, due to the embargo by the US, Microsoft software is hard to come by legally and difficult to update.
Hector Rodriguez, dean of the School of Free Software at the University of Information Sciences in Cuba, said that several government ministries as well as the universities have switched to the Linux platform, but there has been some struggle with other government sectors that are worried that the operating system will not be compatible with necessary and unique software.
He also said that he expects half of the computers on the island to be running Nova within five years, as well as:
Private software can have black holes and malicious codes that one doesn't know about. That doesn't happen with free software.
Also:
The free software movement is closer to the ideology of the Cuban people, above all for the independence and sovereignty.
The Cuban people apparently need independence from Microsoft and the world at large, and just what Rodriguez means by "soveriegnty..." well, using one's creativity, that could mean anything from having a superior system to Windows to taking over the world by nuclear force; I'm personally rooting for the former.
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