Cuba and Linux: a natural fit

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:42

Opinion and Analysis

A little less than seven years ago, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told Microsoft's annual financial analysts meeting in Seattle that GNU/Linux had something in common with communism.

Trying to emphasise the competitive threat which GNU/Linux was said to present at that time, Ballmer said: "There's no company called Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it's free."

It would be interesting to know what Ballmer thinks of Linux now after America's number one bete noir, Cuba, announced that it would be slowly moving to increase its take-up of the GNU/Linux operating system.

To put the whole thing in perspective, let's remember that in May 2005, Roberto del Puerto, director of the Cuba's state office of information technology, told the government daily Juventud Rebelde that Cuba would gradually switch to GNU/Linux.

Two years down the line, it is only to be expected that some progress would have been made.

The presence of Free Software Foundation chief Richard Stallman at the technology conference in Havana where the announcement was made on Sunday has been taken to mean that he had some role in "convincing" the Cuban authorities to switch to Linux. Stallman may have given the move some added impetus but the decision had already been made.

Senor del Puerto said in May 2005 that the government's computers would be moved from  Windows to Linux. He said the island nation had 1500 Linux users and was building a Linux developer community. The island's University of Computer Science had 6000 students at the time and Senor del Puerto said they would be encouraged to participate in the indigenous development of Linux programs as part of Cuba's Linux initiatives.