Gilberto Gil has left the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. He says that music has called him back.

A quick look at reactions surfacing this week in the headlines of the Brazilian mainstream media tell of a singer-minister who did a passable job in using his social capital to boost the ministry’s actions into international channels. Gil’s assignment was almost passed off as just one more of Lula’s ‘populist tricks’ to hold qualified support for himself.

The seemingly condescending tone of Brazilian media comments and analyses about Gil’s performance as a minister are definitely not a surprise. During his term, the mainstream outlets basically ignored or ridiculed some major international coverage such as 2004 Wired magazine article, telling about Gil’s ahead-of-the-curve awareness of the importance of openness among the principles of the digital revolution.

He was ridiculed, indeed, when during an inauguration class at the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in August 2004 he declared:

“I, Gilberto Gil, Brazilian citizen, world citizen and Minister of Culture of Brazil, develop my work in music, in the ministry and in all the dimensions of my existence under the inspiration of hacker ethics; I am concerned about the issues that my world and my time pose to me, such as the issue of the digital divide, of free software and also the issue of regulation and development of audiovisual content production and distribution, by any media, for any purpose”.

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April fool’s day this year has brought a bitter taste to the Brazilian open source community. The announcement of the approval of Microsoft’s Open XML Format (OOXML) as an ISO/IEC International Standard was, at first, seen as some kind of joke. After all, OOXML had lost a vote on its adoption at ISO in September 2007. The voting members had requested hundreds of adjustments to the standard however it is widely known that today the majority have remained unimplemented. But let’s check out why such a drab debate over technical standards has caught the attention of so many bloggers in Brazil.

The open source movement in Brazil, with all its successes and failures, has somehow turned into a cultural trend. In this context, Microsoft’s Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) and its proprietary files’ format became the very symbol of the monopolistic obstacle against the freedom pursued by free software activists, and also the main target of government agencies’ official substitution policies. Where the Linux operating system was still not ready to reign, at least OpenOffice — with it’s ISO approved ODF file format standard — could help breaking Microsoft’s cultural hegemony. And it worked!

In fact, it seems that the strategy has worked too well. Microsoft started to see its multi-billion dollar Office business model menaced by the rising trend of governments giving preference to open standards in their decisions on software acquisition. The tactical reaction of Microsoft in defense of their monopoly position was to blitz for the sanction of their incompatible alternative format Open XML as a second ISO standard. Bloggers decried that the strategy used to carry OOXML through the ISO fast-track process has damaged the standard’s credibility and created serious consequences for the whole concept of open standards. Indeed, Microsoft tactics can bring forth an intense rage among those Brazilians who have worked so long and so hard for open standards, and it is not surprising to see MS portrayed not merely as a monopolist but as a monster.

Although having (barely) followed the procedural norms, ISO has lost (or at least damaged) its credibility by being involved in a process that was corrupted behind the scenes by a series of suspicions, irregularities, lobbies and so forth. If the approval had been reached by agreement, be it through Fast-Track or not, ISO would have maintained its credibility. But by passively conceding to Redmond’s pressure, and not checking the decision-making procedures of the various countries, ISO has damaged its credibility in a permanent way — and somehow thwarted all the other ISO standards.
OOXML = ISO 29500 - Microsoft Wins, we all lose - Linux… e mais coisas

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A new arena is gathering steam and significance in the Brazilian Internet space: the football blogs. It should be no surprise given how natives are impassioned for the game, and how the latest results of the many championships become part of the casual chit-chat everywhere. Day by day, fervent fans are finding out that blogs and other media possibilities — podcasts, webcasts, foruns and chats — are invaluable tools to display, promote and exchange opinions about the many games, and also to express their passion for their favorite football club teams.

The most evident feature brought by the wave of new entrants in the sports chronicle on the web is the customized report and commentary produced by teams’ fans. Since TV transmissions of football games started in Brazil, referees are not the only ones to be sujected to biased scrutiny of the fans. The obligatory account of the games by speakers and commentators from major TV networks, regular owners of exclusive broadcasting rights, also suffer the sharp analysis — and fiery reactions — from the opinionated crowd of the many clubs’ supporters.

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There is no clear consensus about the specific reasons that occasionally boost Brazil to the cutting edge of the open source revolution. For us here in the field, facing so many difficulties, ranging from simple misunderstandings to big resource constraints, the international acclaim sounds a bit exaggerated, and at times misinformed. Ever since the remarkable 2004 Wired magazine article — We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin — started the world buzz, and until quite recently, the Brazilian media was not following what was really going on. Partly because of innocent ignorance and partly because of economic and political reasons the full story was not being delivered to the mass TV audience. But now that some fruits of the first generation of “seed” ideas are starting to ripen into visibility to bigger audiences, and as principles of the ‘open’ protocol start to be tested in other sectors more and more commentators are joining in the conversation focusing on specific areas that catch their attention.

No brilhante texto de Dibbell (leia na íntegra), o ministro da Cultura, Gilberto Gil, já atacava “os fundamentalistas do controle absoluto sobre a propriedade” e o seu iminente fracasso. “Um mundo aberto pelas comunicações não pode se manter fechado em uma visão feudal de propriedade”, diz. “Nenhum país, nem os Estados Unidos, ou a Europa, pode ficar no caminho. É uma tendência global. É parte do próprio processo de civilização. É a abundância semântica do mundo moderno, do mundo pós-moderno – e não há por que resistir a isso”. Com esse pensamento compartilhado por uma parte do governo Lula e com o Fórum Internacional de Software Livre (fisl) realizado em abril pela oitava vez em Porto Alegre, o Brasil continua como um dos maiores inimigos da propriedade intelectual como a conhecemos hoje na indústria do conhecimento capitalista, como já vem sendo noticiado pelo mundo todo.
Brasil perpetua-se como inimigo número um da propriedade intelectual, por Carlos Gustavo Yoda - Blog do Turquinho

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