Cesar Brod's blog

[Em português]

Introduction

For quite a long time - more than ten years now! - I owed my good friend Jon "maddog" Hall an English translation of his famous "Chimarrão Lessons". Now that Latinoware 2012 is approaching and I will meet him in Foz do Iguaçu next week I decided to honor my promise!

Latinoware's participants cannot imagine having a Maddog-Free Latinoware. The godfather of free and open source software, the one responsible for sparking the first port of Linux outside the Intel's 386 processor family and one of the main visionaries in the IT industry is coming again to Latinoware where, again, he will be followed by a hurd of picture takers.

We all don't speak the same language. Technology however, has allowed us to communicate through several non-textual, non-verbal ways...

I have been working with ICT since the early 80s. At the time, we had a kind of hardware called PCM - Plug Compatible Machines. Compatible with what? The IBM Bus&Tag, SNA communications model. In the mid 80s, PCs started showing up in the banking industry (at least where I was working here in Brazil). Major need: IBM 3270 emulation.

I like to keep myself up to date in terms of technology news. One of the things I do is subscribe to RSS feeds of several, reliable news sources and blogs. It is always interesting to see some new story or post popping up on a block of my iGoogle and them see the repercussions on this new issue popping up on the other feeds blocks.

I have been working with Linux since 1993, and with open source software long before this. I actively organized the first International Free Software Forums in Brazil and also helped the organization of several other events. I was blessed enough with invitations to participate in several international Open Source trade shows. More important than all of this, I have envisioned and created a model of co-operative production of open source software that employs more than 40 people in the south of Brazil. This model has been copied and adapted countrywide.