Cuba likes open source = dog bites man

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 20 February 2007 12:21

Business IT - Technology

Why anyone would be surprised to hear that the Cuban government is continuing a migration to open source software is beyond me.

Given the ongoing hostility between Cuba and the US, you can see why the Cuban government might have been concerned to hear that Microsoft had some help from the NSA with Vista's security features. At least with open source software you can review the code.

(But there's still the problem of being sure that the compiled version of your program exactly corresponds with the source - over 20 years ago, Ken Thompson showed how a compiler written in the language that it compiles can be created in such a way that it builds additional functions into its output even though there is no trace of that capability in the compiler's own source. As Thompson put it, "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.")

Then there's the foreign currency issue. Countries like Cuba have relatively low gross domestic products, so why would they spend precious foreign currency on software? In the absence of local silicon foundries and other manufacturing capability, they have no choice but to buy hardware from overseas. But software? No. Once open source projects reach the "good enough" stage it's hard to see why less affluent countries would stick with proprietary software. Furthermore, it's generally accepted that Linux will extract better performance out of older hardware than you'll get from Windows, which suggests it can extend the life of ageing hardware that you can't afford to replace.

That shouldn't be taken as a suggestion that open source is "good enough" for lesser economies but not for developed nations, by the way. After all, even capitalist success stories such as Google use some open source. And how many web servers run Apache?

It makes a lot of sense for Cuba to avoid commercially imported software. Apart from the cost factor, using open source provides its government with a way of further nurturing local development expertise that's not possible where COTS (commercial off the shelf) dominates.