The freedom of not paying for intellectual propriety rights: A comparative perspective between Brazil's and Ecuador's strategies for fostering local intelligency through free software

In the early 1980's, the Free Software Movement created a copyright license that uses the language and the copyright system to subvert its principles and pragmatics. Instead of creating a temporary monopoly to allow a creator to profit from her creation, the GNU/GPL ensures that the software licensed below its terms and conditions will be publicly available and free to be used and studied in a way the software's code can evolve through a shared social process. The ethical and philosophical principles of the GNU/GPL can be found in a famous Free Software Foundation's document known as the free software's 4 freedoms. In the late 1990s, the term free was considered ambiguous and harmful to the new business models that took advantage of the comercial and industrial potential of shared development recently discovered. The root of this consideration is that the term carries the idea of gratuity. The more radical activists of the movement then proceeded to defend the idea that the benefits and advantages of free software did not consist in a matter of price but of freedom. In this article, I seek to show that the second freedom of free software, the one that allows programs to be used without having to pay, is an essential factor for the understanding of the evolution of free software in South America. Through a comparative persctive between Brazil's experience and the recent experience of Ecuador I intend to show how gratuity and freedom get together, and I will also evaluate the extent in which this encounter fosters technological sovereignty in these countries.