• Submitted by: manso
• Society
• 03 / 30 / 2011

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Lack of access to commercial software makes open source the only choice for Cuba. By Alan Shimel on Tue, 03/29/11 - 2:09pm.In case you want to attend, Cuba is hosting the Latin American Festival of Open Source Software on April 9th. It seems Cuba is a big supporter of open source and is trying to have a majority of its computers run Linux. In fact Cuba has its own Linux distribution called Nova. But if you think about it, Cuba does not really have a choice but to support open source.  

For over 50 years now, Cuba has been under a trade embargo with any US goods. That means that US companies cannot trade directly with Cuba and even third party countries cannot trade US goods with Cuba either. As a result with so much of the IT industry being US based or US derived, Cuba has a very hard time getting both hardware and software in the country.  

For the government and educational sectors computer technology was more and more necessary. For a long time Cuba relied on the Soviet Union to provide computer technology. In fact based upon that technology, Cuba was selling technology back to the Soviets. But of course that all dried up with the end of the Soviet Union.  Cuba had to find another source.

Luckily for Cuba by now most of the hardware was being built in China and other areas that would sell to the Cubans.  However, the software was still US based, so getting Windows, Office or even security software was a real problem.  Consequently, most of the computers run pirated copies of Windows that have been smuggled in.  

The unique Cuban situation created a new perfect environment to rally behind open source software in general and Linux in particular.  This gave Cuba legal, ready access to quality software, at prices they could afford and free of any US strings or perceived back doors.  This opened up Cuba to the PC era.

Source: www.networkworld.com/community/node/72606