By Elizabeth Armstrong

Brazil is known as the land of samba and Carnival, where music and dance have managed to triumph over the persistent poverty of sprawling favelas and city slums. It is not known as the land of the tech-savvy and its president, Luiz Inacio da Silva, has a sneaking suspicion that a major culprit is costly software.

With a debt-laden government that is the nation's largest computer buyer and a populace where only one in 10 have a computer, Mr. da Silva is taking a serious look at an increasingly popular alternative: open-source software (where programmers follow the basic credo: Do what you wish to improve a product, charge for it if you like, but share the underlying source code you added). So far, his government has no plans to mandate its use, but possible moves (such as switching to open-source in the country's 400,000-plus electronic voting machines instead of a Windows variant) have Microsoft all wobbly at the knees.

Sergio Amadeu, who heads Brazil's National Information Technology Institute, told the Associated Press last week that paying software licensing fees to companies like Microsoft is "unsustainable economically." Open-source is still rare, but he wants "to create a continent" that uses it. (Mr. Amadeu's name spread across Brazil quickly when he launched a network of free computer centers in Sao Paolo before joining da Silva's team.)

Microsoft-led industry group Initiative for Software Choice has tracked 70 open-source proposals in 24 countries and, despite Microsoft's lobbying, a Pentagon report concluded that open source "was typically cheaper and more secure" and that "its use, if anything, should expand."

Denting Microsoft's bottom line doesn't seem to bother the leader of Brazil much. Ditto the leaders of France, Germany, China, and Australia, all of whom have adopted Linux. The operating system, hailed as the largest collaborative project ever (with its famous, cute penguin mascot), is used by 18 million people worldwide for everything from powerful supercomputers to consumer toys (such as TiVo) and portable devices (such as cell phones and handhelds).

Over the past 10 years, in fact, our networked world has been built atop the unwavering (and affordable) foundation of free software products. Two-thirds of the servers that make up the Internet deliver data through Apache, a program developed by people who receive no direct financial compensation for their work, according to technology tracking company Netcraft. (Microsoft is a distant second at 29 percent.) Perl, another free programming language, has become known as the duct tape of the Internet, while Sendmail, created by coders abiding by the open-source credo, directs much of the world's e-mail. The idea is to compete for the sake of improvement, not profit, and it's become, quite unsurprisingly, an easy sell around the world.

The movement toward open-source software tends to be as much about empowerment as it is about the bottom line. In countries like Brazil, where companies import software rather than develop it, open-source legislation is every bit as much a step toward self-sustainability as it is a step away from Microsoft.