[speeder]

That part, is unfortunately true.

My father met the telecom guys (phone card and BINA), and the government not only did not helped, but did things that made their situation worse, in the end no inventor got any money for his invention.

It is just that the guy saying that the other poster was wrong, and that we don't know how to do stuff, is not only wrong, but insults people that (maybe in a stupid manner) insists in doing stuff here.

There is a reason why one of the biggest Free Software conferences is here in Brazil, and why Maddog (from Linux Foundation) comes here so much (I personally bumped into him in conferences I got invited as speaker about 6 or 7 times, even one totally failed conference where I had like 20 people watching, Maddog was there!), the government invests heavily into IT research. (there is Serpro, Cobra, military, and several other cool stuff! The military in particular has several very insteresting non-weapon projects, the brazillian military seemly loves to make stuff that is good for civilian use)

[scardine]

Oh, c'mon. The Lua language is the only relevant software contribution from Brazil that I'm aware of.

The guys behind Lua had to invent a language because the country was commercially closed at the time. The program forbidding technology imports was called "reserva de mercado" (market reservation) and was supposed to incentive local manufacture of semiconductors.

It was a colossal failure and today Brazil is not only irrelevant in electronics but has possibly the most expensive appliances in the world. Anything here costs 3 to 4 times the USA retail price.

Unfortunately we have a long tradition in such idiotic regulations.

[just_testing]

Can you cite examples of non-weapon projects of Brazilian military? (seriously, I'm curious here)

[speeder]

ITA (a university that belongs to Air Force) famously let students to opt out of military, and many went around doing cool stuff.

I once saw a presentation of their students once, there are even people that went on to make games and stuff like that.

Also the military here likes to help Linux in general, even submitting patches, the air force in particular loves Debian and Ubuntu (last I checked, they moved 100% of their servers to Debian and 100% of workstations to Ubuntu)

Then we have some air traffic control software being developed, firewalls, anti-virus, whatnot... This is what I learned on tech conferences (thus obviously it is related to tech)

Also I've heard of the military helping people make vehicle engines.

And then we have Taurus (a weapon manufacturer) that had some business with my family, and seemly the military asked them to do some civilian stuff too (like use their armour technology to make clothes for perilous jobs, for example Motorcycle helmets, also they use their gun steel technology for other things, like construction, building factory machines, car parts...)

I think this has to do with that fact that the military here has some... funding issues. And thus need to cooperate a lot with civilian sector to get anything done.

Oh, and famously, the army built some stuff for the federal government that ended being on schedule, and used less money than budgeted (that they returned), although this was supposed to be normal, it was so exceptional that people think it is totally amazing and awesome (here federal government projects IF they don't fail outright, tend to blow both the budget and deadlines, and have shitty quality, result of hiring contractors and not checking ever if they are doing a good job or not, plus corruption).

[just_testing]

I am a brazilian and I didn't know ANYTHING about those things. Thanks!