Cuba and the USA has been a very frosty relationship for decades and the Castro brothers has since the late 1950s been trying to stand up to our only remaining superpower, which is also one of its closest neighbors. Cuba has uncovered a new threat from the states up north, which has started to spread through the country and its computers. Microsoft is an American company and its Windows operating system is close to a monopolistic state on the Cuban PC market. The government of Cuba is of course not thrilled about this as it claims that American agencies has access to the code of the operating system found all over Cuba.
At the same time the American trade embargo that started in 1962 has made it hard for Cubans to buy and update legal versions of Microsoft's software. The answer is said to be open source, or to be exact Linux;
"Getting greater control over the informatic process is an important issue," said Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, who heads a commission pushing Cuba's migration to free software.
Cuba has developed a Linux distribution of its own that it calls Nova and it hopes that the Linux operating system will have achieved a market share of 50% within five years. The final goal is of course to replace all Microsoft software, something that has caused a bit of a concern among some state companies since some applications requires Windows.
It's always a pleasure to see how the open source community gets more attention, even if the attention comes from the less popular state of Cuba.
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