The well regards for GNU and RMS in the Latin world is due to the strong philosophy against closed software, specially from MS. During most of the 90's and begi

The well regards for GNU and RMS in the Latin world is due to the strong philosophy against closed software, specially from MS. During most of the 90's and beginnings of 2000's, M$ would force their expensive licenses in governmental systems and would make everything to avoid interoperability, even within versions of their own systems. End result was that countries would spend millions just to be able to share documents across agencies. Things started changing when KDE/Slackware, Ubuntu, Firefox, OpenOffice and other software systems started to become user-friendly, with nicer and intuitive interfaces. From this point on, governments started teaching GNU/Linux in schools and universities, explaining the benefits, the rights, etc, and then switching to open-sourced and free-software systems.