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 NEWSGates and Perú president ink IT agreement By Juan Carlos Perez July 16, 2002 7:34 am PT MICROSOFT, FACING PROPOSED legislation in Perú that would seriously hamper its sales to the government, on Monday signed a wide-ranging agreement with that country's president that would involve Microsoft in a variety of government-sponsored technology projects.
If a bill that included that provision becomes law, it's not clear how it would affect the agreement signed Monday in Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters by Perú President Alejandro Toledo and Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates. The proponents of the open-source bills say that using open-source software would save Perú's government money in software licenses and give it more flexibility to modify and distribute its applications. Opponents of the bill maintain that it goes against free-market rules and that it would harm Perú's software development industry. Monday's agreement calls for Microsoft to donate resources, products, services and an undisclosed amount of cash to assist the Peruvian government with several IT initiatives, said Ricardo Adame, Microsoft's manager of international public relations, on Monday. The Peruvian government isn't expected to give anything in return, he added, since the spirit of the agreement is for Microsoft to support Perú's initiatives, he said. According to statements from Microsoft and the Peruvian government, the initiatives outlined in the agreement include: -- computer training for about 6,000 teachers from about 500 schools attended by about 200,000 students; -- the design and implementation of a government intranet to improve communication among public agencies, and of a Web portal to let citizens access government services and information online; -- the creation of three Microsoft training centers for training hundreds of IT instructors in Microsoft technology who can then teach thousands of IT professionals. The agreement shares similarities with one Microsoft recently reached with México's government, Adame said. In the México agreement, Microsoft is donating about $100 million in software and training to bolster the government's efforts to build out the country's IT infrastructure and move its 100 million citizens online by 2006. That agreement sparked controversy in México because open-source advocates feel it quashed their efforts to make open-source software a key part of the project. In an apparent attempt to address the open source issue in Perú, Microsoft also agreed to share the source code of its Windows operating system with Peruvian universities for research and educational purposes, something that is already available in Perú for the Windows CE operating system, Microsoft said in its statement. Enrique Saldívar, director of Microsoft's government unit in Perú, said Monday's agreement between Gates and Toledo is unrelated to the open-source bills that are now before the Peruvian Congress. "The agreement has nothing to do with the legislative initiatives," he said Monday. The agreement is not a contract, Saldívar said, adding that he ignored that legal framework, if any, of the accord, which was called in Spanish a "convenio interinstitucional" (interinstitutional agreement) by Microsoft in its statement. Microsoft's program for sharing the source code of some of its software products was launched over a year ago, in what many consider to be a reaction to the rising popularity of the open source movement. Although the Microsoft program grants much more access to company source code than before, it doesn't match the freedom of the source code movement, something that Microsoft contends would force it to give away its intellectual property and thus cause serious damage to its bottom line. Juan Carlos Perez is Latin American bureau chief for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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