MADDOG'S DOGHOUSE

Free software, and the FOSS community, can help technology students get the education they desire in Brazil and elsewhere.

- BY JON "MADDOG" HALL

Around the year 1996, I started traveling to Brazil and from there the rest of Latin America. I have often written about the conferences I attended, the people I talked with, and particularly the students.

Twelve years ago a student approached me and asked “maddog, how can I make money with free software?” Of course, there are many ways to make money with free software, but before I started down this long discourse I realized that what he was really asking was “How can I make money with free software?”

About the same time I started a project at the University of São Paulo with the goal of being able to design, create a supply chain for, manufacture, and distribute a computer along the lines of the Raspberry Pi. One of the issues was that, at the time, the Raspberry Pi would cost about $150 US in Brazil due to shipping, tariffs, etc., and this was a lot of money for a people who might be making less than a third of the salary of a person in the United States. When you give a $35 Raspberry Pi to a student and they ruin it, you tell them to be more careful and you give them another. When it would cost the equivalent of $200 or more, you might not even give them one in the first place.