Cuba Embraces 'Technological Sovereignty'
In a symbolic technological move geared towards telling the U.S. to read between the lines, Cuba has announced it will be ditching Microsoft for open source in order to protect national security. Open source as a movement is based on a network of members who work together by contributing code compiled for programs and applications which can then be freely distributed in order to help provide an alternative to expensive software required to run a PC. In other words, the open source movement is about freeing PC owners from having no alternative but to pay for software needed to use a PC in the first place. Cuba is not the first country to move away from Microsoft as China, Brazil, and Norway have all adopted open source technology.
Cuba's communist government is trying to shake off the yoke of at least one capitalist empire by joining with socialist Venezuela in converting its computers to open source Click for Open Source Router - Firewall from Vyatta Latest News about open source software. Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code. "It's basically a problem of technological sovereignty, a problem of ideology," said Hector Rodriguez, who oversees a Cuban university department of 1,000 students dedicated to developing open source programs.
