Bill Gates is trying to get a meeting with the president of Brazil, presumably to lobby against the Brazilian government's planned migration to Linux and free software.

Tired of paying costly licensing fees to companies like Microsoft, Brazil, the world's eighth-most wired nation, has told agencies in its sprawling federal bureaucracy to move to Linux and free software programs that run on it.

This year, the government will try to get private citizens to make the switch. It will partially subsidize the purchase for lower middle-class people of 1 million computers running Linux along with 25 other open source programs.

Microsoft has had some success combatting these kinds of government initiatives by coming in and offering huge discounts, which makes me wonder how many of these announcements are just ploys to get price breaks from Microsoft. Brazil seems pretty committed, though, and doesn't seem to even want to talk to Gates.