Agência Brasil
Brasília – With a course that will be held this month in Brasília, Brazil begins the training of civil servants in the use of Free Software. Free Software replaces proprietary software and constitutes an open technology that enhances the integration and autonomy of information systems. For the government, this means reducing software costs and modernizing national information technology.
Free Software is a computer program that can be copied, distributed, used, and modified at will, representing savings, for example, for municipal governments that pay for licenses to use proprietary software installed in computers that use the Linux system and the Open Office program.
Software is one of the priority areas of the industrial policy announced by President Lula. According to information from the Secretariat of Logistics and Information Technology, in the Ministry of Planning, Brazil as a whole, between the government and the private sector, spends around US$ 1.1 billion annually on licenses for the use of proprietary software.
In the US, the space agency, NASA, and the Army already use free software in their information systems.
