Section 14.8. Walking the Path

14.8. Walking the Path

With such restrictions from the FOSS community, openly discussing Java and software livre seems to be easier said than done. However, we have a series of successful examples in Brazil that are helping put some light on the possibilities that Java and software livre can bring to developers and deployers.

We saw how Brazil has chosen the freedom path and some of the strong reasoning behind that. One of the pillars of that choice is, without a doubt, software livre: it has pushed the idea of technology independence to other levels, and has prompted the whole country to discuss freedom in other related areas, like the Internet, music, and information sharing. It has also captured all the attention, and many what are now discussed as a "software livre" initiative, although more related to freedom in general.

Because of this discussion of choice and freedom alongside software livre, other initiatives are strongly pursued. Standards, for example, receive special attention from the many government agencies. Serpro, the largest Brazilian federal IT agency, an organization with thousands of developers working in governmental software, has declared that one of its main responsibilities is to create, defend, and apply national standards. Standards are defined and then used to guarantee vendor independence, and then to allow the inclusion of FOSS solutionsif they exist and are stableas a preferred choice for acquisition.

But even before software livre was ever discussed in Brazil, multiplatform applications became increasingly important in the quest for vendor independence. Microsoft lock-in was the main catalyst, because lock-in to any vendor is one of the main worries inside companies and the government. Add to that the almost mandatory requirement that every government's software must support GNU/Linux while still supporting the huge legacy of Windows systems, usually developed by Windows developers that had literally a few hours to start generating multiplatform code while still using their Windows machines....

Because of all this, from the start Java played an important role in guaranteeing freedom for both the Brazilian government and Brazilian companies. As early as 1996 long before software livre was actually considered a real option anywhere in the worldsoftware companies and the many government development agencies saw in Java the opportunity to gain freedom from Microsoft lock-in. This was an important step: for the first time, Brazilian developers were even considering another platform for software development. The search for independenceplatform independence in this casedrove widespread adoption of the technology inside the government. The government-owned Banco do Brasil (Latin America's largest bank), adopted Java in 1997, training more than 800 developers in their first Java training program. This is an early example of the search for freedom that happened before the OSI (and thus the open source definition) even existed, and long before any significant discussion of free software in the country.

Although many try to exclude Java developers from the FOSS movement, in Brazil it is sometimes hard to separate these two communities. Much of the development in the country is being done in Java today, including a large percentage of the FOSS development. Projects like JForum, JBanana, Prevayler, Bossa, eGen, Javali, Genesis, and Hotwork are just some examples of Java-based Brazilian FOSS projects that are in use throughout the country.

The early software livre movement was clearly driven by system administrators, security experts, web designers, social scientists, and politicians. They did one of the world's most effective pushes for the adoption of software livre and, if it had been only that, it would already be an impressive and fundamental contribution. However, they did more, and the software livre movement went far beyond the simple adoption push. They moved the software livre discussion into the country's hearth and involved politicians, lawyers, judges, social scientists, financing institutions, entrepreneurs, large- and small-business owners, and the government at largein short, creating a viable ecosystem for software livre to flourish. Unfortunately, when it got time to discuss software development, they fell short. The push to use software livre was so strong that more concern was put into migration and digital inclusion strategies. Although there were very good FOSS developers and important projects, software development issues were given little attention initially. This is where the Brazilian Java community has been focusing its contribution, bringing software development back into the discussion.

Java is one of the most-used languages in the country and is the only one that is multiplatform and has strong support in both Windows and in GNU/Linux. So, it is understandable that most of the development discussion in FOSS happens around Java. There are many examples. Of the recent open source applications that have received financing from the Brazilian government, almost all are developed in Java, many running on top of free Java application servers like Tomcat and JBoss. At FOSS events in Brazil, it's easy to notice that most of the presentation proposals submitted that deal with development are Java related. Surprisingly, there's a lot less support and interest for important FOSS languages such as Perl, PHP, and Python.

Through the history of the software livre movement in Brazil, Java has played an important part, although at times it has been ignored and downplayed by many. Here are some other examples:

Direto

Developed as a replacement of Lotus Notes and Exchange, Direto is a web-based email and collaboration tool that handles calendar, address book, and other functionality. Developed by Procergs, the IT agency of Rio Grande do Sul (where FISL is held), Direto runs on GNU/Linux and Tomcat, with lots of other FOSS solutions. The development was mainly done in Java, and at the time it was released, it was the first initiative from a government agency to release a free software product. Because of the work done by one of the most respected free software developers in the country, Ricardo "Gandhy" de Mello (a Java developer), Direto was at some point able to run, with some limitations, on a free Java runtime. Today it probably would run on today's much better free runtimes if anyone cared to try. Direto is a strong example of how we can get one freedom, and then the next.

IRPFJava, the multiplatform income tax report application

For many years, to submit your yearly income tax report (IRPF) electronically, receive all the benefits of faster tax returns, and easily handle the complex forms, a Windows machine was needed. As a result, the government received many complaints from Mac and GNU/Linux users who had to resort to friends or accountants. This was an example of a government application that forced citizens to use a proprietary product. Receita Federal, the agency responsible for IRPF, rewrote the application to support multiple platforms, specifically GNU/Linux. IRPFJava became the first federal application targeted for large public consumption that was focused on supporting GNU/Linux. As expected, the developers were still using Windows and had no knowledge of GNU/Linux or the Mac: they relied on Java to support those and the many other OSes that were used to submit the reports. As another good example that shows the possibility of freedom in steps, efforts are now underway to use the free Java runtime to run the application.

Banco do Brasil, Caixa Economica Federal, Dataprev, Datasus, Procergs, and Serpro, to name but a few

These are public companies and agencies, and are among the largest developers of software inside the Brazilian government. All use Java heavily to guarantee vendor independence, and many were doing that long before the software livre movement took place in the country. Most have chosen to use Java-based FOSS tools and products because it made commercial and technological sense, and these projects are promoted today as success cases of software livre adoption. To show their support for software livre, many of these agencies refer to their use of Java-based products such as Tomcat, JBoss, and Eclipse. In some of these places, Java-based tools are the only free software development tools being used. This is a clear sign of the importance of Java in software livre initiatives.

That is not to say that everything related to development that happens in the Brazilian software livre movement is necessarily related to Java. Far from it. The fact is that Java was there from the start, guaranteeing freedom inside the government, even before the software livre discussion turned mainstream. This should not be ignored or downplayed. And while most of the world is creating a chasm between Java and software livre, in Brazil Java is effectively being used as a lever to push software livre to higher grounds.