Uses of Debian in Venezuela

I'm just back from the IV Foro Mundial de Conocimiento Libre that happened in Maturín, Venezuela from the 17th to the 21st of October.

Besides it being a great event and a great opportunity to meet great people (here are photos taken by Ana), it gave me the chance of seeing a bunch more uses of Debian that I didn't know about.

José Parrella kindly provided me with a list that should open a short series of blog posts:

• SAPI - Servicio Autonomo de la Propiedad Intelectual (the Patents Office which will hold all of the Cuban and Venezuelan patents) uses Debian in all of their servers, including the HP StorageWorks 9.5 TB. They are listed in Who's using Debian.

• MCT - Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (the Ministry of Science and Technology), is on charge of the migration process to Free Software. All the decision-makers uses at least dual boot, but most of them use exclusively Debian.

  At the conference I had a pleasant conversation with one of their representatives, discussing various aspects to keep in mind when choosing a piece of Free Software to use.

• PNAT, the National Plan for IT Literacy, uses Debian (or Ubuntu) in all laboratories around the country.

• CONATEL (the local FCC) uses Debian in servers and Internet Access Points.

• PDVSA (the national oil company) uses Debian in some areas, most notably they've setup videoconferences using OpenH.323 or MBONE using Debian in the PDVSA side.

• FONDAFA (the government fund for agricoltural development), uses Debian in their servers.

• SECODENA, the local Pentagon, uses Debian in their servers.

• DGIM, the local CIA, also uses Debian. Which is kind of creepy. The website runs on ASP, but they have a complete PDC/BDC and Mail Servers using Debian Sarge.

• EDELCA, an energy company in the southern states of the country, is implementing Debian right now. They have several hundreds of desktops already running Debian, and they're migrating network services (LDAP, Mail servers, etc.). There are two huge hydroelectric dams they operate.

More to come as I get back to other people I've met there.