Microsoft suing Brazilian official

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taken from http://lwn.net/Articles/90428/
Microsoft has launched a defamation lawsuit against Sérgio Amadeu, the president of the Brazilian National Institute for Information Technology and a leader of Brazil's move toward free software. Mr. Amadeu's crime, it would seem, was a public statement comparing Microsoft's habit of giving software to governments to the tactics used by drug dealers. Information on the net is still scarce, but is out there: in Portuguese are this Carta Maior article, a brief media statement from Mr. Amadeu, and this article on the Software Livre site. In English you'll find a petition in support of Mr. Amadeu and two separate entries on Pablo Lorenzzoni's weblog showing other uses of the "drug dealer" comparison and giving a translation of the media statement. (Thanks to Jeroen Dekkers and Juan Carlos Castro Y Castro).

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Man, the Microsoft strategies are getting weirder and weirder..

I for one signed the petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/amadeuus/

Especialy since

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Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
- Bill Gates, Fortune Magazine, July 20th, 1998
(Courtesy of http://www.p2pnet.net/issue04/issues.html)

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