Cuba goes Open Source
From VNUNet:
The government of Cuba has announced plans to take the whole country open source as soon as possible.
Communications Minister Ramiro Valdés announced the plan at a conference in Havana, and said that Microsoft had cooperated with government agencies and intelligence services in the past.
Valdes insisted that the information technology industry is a “battlefield” on which Cuba must fight.
He also highlighted a quote from Bill Gates, who described open source enthusiasts as “some new modern-day sort of communists”, pointing out that this would be a badge of honour for Cubans.
The article goes on to say that Cubans are developing their own linux distribution called Nova, based on Gentoo and that estimates are that there are around 3,000 Open Source developers based in Cuba.
It’s an interesting article on a number of fronts - linux is known to be more secure than windows and I’m sure it’s not the first national that has decided to move towards this technology (although I suspect that most would chose Sun).
With the advancements being made with GUI’s like KDE4 it will be interesting to see if some of Microsofts dominance starts to buckle - especially in the corporate environment.