Acabei de fazer esta apresentação aqui no IWEEE. A transcrição está abaixo:

Slide 1

Hello everybody and thanks again to the IWEEE organizers for allowing me to participate in this event. I do know it’s not an easy task organizing an event like this!

Slide 2

First of all, let me tell you: My name is Cesar Brod and different from most of you, I am a nerd, not a doctor! I have been working with free and open source software since the early 1990s, when I discovered Linux. From that time on I have managed several development projects and also created business models for them. I got involved with IWEEE when I invited Luis Falcon to present Medical at Latinoware 2009. He liked the whole structure Brasil was putting together to support free and open source software development and he believed people who develop, or need, health related solutions should know what we were doing.

Slide 3

Today, Linux and other free and open source software are quite well spreaded. And still, lots of times I still need to explain people what free software is all about. What kind of freedom we mean when we are talking about technology. So, I decided to take a different approach for this presentation and I asked myself what is health? What is disease? I found it is as difficult to explain as freedom is.

Slide 4

In 1851, the american doctor Samuel Cartwright described an illness called Drapetomania. The strange and strong desire some slaves acquire for freedom. One of the symptoms can be easily spotted: your slave starts to raise his eyes to look at you.

Slide 5

Fortunately, Dr. Cartwright was also able to prescribe a treatment.

Slide 6

A more modern disease is crack adiction. Adults, teens and children, in an atempt to escape from their reality become adicted to crack and other drugs.

Slide 7

Fortunately, there is also a treatment for this illness.

Slides 8 and 9

Of course I have picked up some very punctual examples of unhealthy people. But let us take a look at some definitions for health.

Accordingly to the World Health Organization, Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Moacyr Scliar (1937 - 2011) says: The meaning of “health” is directly related to the social, economical, political and cultural environment. Health doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. It varies accordingly to the time, place, social position. It depends on individual values, scientific, phylosophycal and religious conceptions.

Slides 10 and 11

Freedom

Now, about Freedom. It is also not very easy to explain what Freedom is…

“Freedom is something that the human dream feeds, that none can explain and none cannot understand”

I like this definition by the poet Cecilia Meireles…

After all, defining health and freedom is something very personal…

Health and Freedom go hand in hand

Slide 12

What about technology?

As the definition of health depends on a whole well being feeling, I believe people must perceive themselves as free in order to perceive themselves as healthy. Now, what about technology? Didn’t we invent technology so we could free ourselves from hard labor, so we could free our minds for our intelectual quests?

Slide 13

In 1781 the Steam Machine was invented and patented in the United Kingdon, starting up an industrial age. Of course, some people lost their jobs once the machines were now able to do some of their work…

Slide 14

But soon lots and lots of people were needed to operate machines that would help building tons of things we wanted to buy, such as cars… Machines should be fast and easy to operate…

Slide 15

Children are able to handle mass production machines today. Looks like we have been building a real better world.

Slides 16 and 17

Now, what about software? Software is a pure product of the mind. It is a set of instructions we place in order to operate all sorts of things.

In order to launch a rocket we will need our control software to use the formulas devised by Bhaskara and Newton, among others. So we will be able to describe the parabolic route of the rocket and we will know how to compensate the force of gravity in order to set a sattelite in a stationary orbit. There are no patents associated with the works of Newton, Bhaskara, Pitagoras, Euclides and others, so we can freely use their knowledge. However, more recent and relevant knowledge is now protected by patents. This means we have to pay to use this knowledge.

Slide 18 and 19

For instance, recently Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, in the interest of its company, sued other companies using some very relevant, non-public, knowledge, such as “Allerting Users to Items of Current Interest”. 

Really, Microsoft? Really?

So, all of you should take care when showing a friend something they might be interested here in Medetel. You might be sued!

Slides 20 and 21

In Brazil, around twelve years ago, the conscience about free and open source software started to grow stronger. This brought a bigger discussion and awareness of all sorts of free technology, free knowledge. What was really interesting is that the Brazilian Worker’s Party government, starting with the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, took a strong position in favor of free software.

Here are a few milestones in our history with free software.

Slide 22

In the early 1990’s Linux, FreeBSd, apache and other free software started to be used in “the edges” of the IT infrastructure, in internet service providers, printing, file and network services.

In 2000 the domain softwarelivre.rs.gov.br was created. It was the first .gov.br site to bear the words Software Livre - Free Software, and it served as the basis for the state’s Free Software Project.

In 1999 we started developing Sagu, an academic administration system and in 2000 we decided, in order to share what we were doing and get more people involved with the project, to host a development workshop, telling people exactly how we were doing and exposing our code to everyone. The Sagu Workshop later became Free Software Development Seminars we held all over Brazil.

Also, in 2000, in order to host Sagu we started our own “SourceForge-like” repository. The development community in Brazil started asking us to host their projects there and so CodigoLivre was created. The first latin american free software repository, Today, CodigoLivre hosts more than 2000 projects supported by more than 15000 developers.

Slide 23

In 2001, Sagu got the attention of Linux Gazette and I was asked to write an article about it. It was the first article about free software in Brasil to show up in an international magazine.

Slide 24

In 2002, after visiting the International Free Software Forum, Jon “maddog” Hall wrote an article about Free Software in Brazil for Linux Journal, where he also mentioned Sagu.

Slide 25

In 2003, Free Software goes Federal with the creation of www.softwarelivre.gov.br by the government’ s own IT agency. Also, Solis, the first free software development services co-operative in the world was created. Still today, most of Solis services are related to the academic administration software Sagu and the library automation system Gnuteca.

Slide 26

In 2005, free software in Brazil jumps from technical publications to mainstream mídia, such as the BBC and the New York Times.

Slide 27

In 2007, the Brazilian Public Software Portal was created. One of the main ideas of this portal is to foster the creation of users and developers communities around the systems it hosts. It is more than a repository. It is a place where people can go for mature projects and find ways to get involved, get support, hire developers. More than 50 solutions, all public, all free software are hosted there today. Including Sagu and Gnuteca that I mentioned before.

Slide 28 and 29

As this event is all about health, I will tell about only one solution hosted in the Public Software Portal. Invesalius is a very useful software for diagnosis and surgical intervation planning. It takes a set of two dimensional scanned images from CT or MRI scans and builds 3D visualizations. This images can be rotated, drill down views can be performed

Slide 30

So, in conclusion, what I do believe all of us agree is health, technology and freedom do go hand in hand. Or at least they should. We cannot afford compromising people’s health, well being, happiness, by hiding any kind of knowledge that must be free.

Slide 31

Portal Software Público Brasileiro

http://www.softwarepublico.gov.br

Invesalius

http://tinyurl.com/invesalius

Shameless plug

http://brodtec.com

cesar@brodtec.com

@cesarbrod

Slide 32

Diseases? (video)

Thanks to my partner, Joice, for suggesting this video for the end of my presentation to you. 

Of course, there is a lot more we can talk about and we will be around here, both myself and my good old friend Corinto, the father of Software Público. Thanks for your time and for your attention!