Cuba fights computer imperialism with Linux

It’s pretty impressive, Cuba only legalized the ownership of home computers last year, but the island nation has already launched its own computer operating system. The OS, dubbed “Nova” is built on the Linux platform and was introduced this week at a computer conference on “technological sovereignty” in Havana.

Cuba’s logic goes like this - since US security agencies have their own built-in backdoors to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system, it's not a secure platform for the Cuban government’s computers, so they wanted their own OS. Nova is a bundle of Linux OS applications; Linux is the free, open-source computer operating system promoted as an alternative to the corporate closed-source OS sold by Microsoft (and for that matter Apple as well). Since it's open-source, anyone is free to make improvements to it or customize it to better suit their own needs, a spirit that meshes well with the Cuban government’s socialist worldview.

“The free software movement is closer to the ideology of the Cuban people, above all for the independence and sovereignty,” said Hector Rodriguez, dean of the School of Free Software at Cuba's University of Information Sciences. About 20% of the PCs in Cuba are already using Linux; Cuban officials hope that Nova will push that number to 50% in the next few years.