Nova is a Cuba

Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...

n state-sponsored Linux distribution

Linux distribution

A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...

 launched in February 2009. It is developed in Havana

Havana

Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...

 at the University of Information Science

University of Information Science

The University of Information Science is a university research center based in Havana, Cuba, in the municipality of Boyeros. Born as a project of the Cuban Revolution called the "Future Project" which has two objectives: to computerize the country and develop the software industry to contribute to...

 (UCI) by students and professors to provide free/libre/open-source software

Free and open source software

Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...

 (FLOSS) to inexperienced users and Cuban institutions.

Goal and adoption

The goal of Nova is to achieve "sovereignty and technological independence" and to have it installed on all computers in Cuba where Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 still is the most widely used operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. The system is central to the Cuban government's desire to replace Windows. Hector Rodriguez, Director of UCI, said that "[t]he free software movement is closer to the ideology of the Cuban people, above all for the independence and sovereignty." Other cited reasons to develop the system include the United States embargo against Cuba

United States embargo against Cuba

The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...

 which has made is hard for Cubans to legally buy and update Windows, as well as potential security issues feared by the Cuban government because of the U.S. Government's alleged access to Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's source code

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

.

Cuba is planning to convert to Nova as its main operating system; once the migration is complete it will be installed in 90% of all work places. By early 2011 the UCI announced that they would migrate more than 8000 computers to the new operating system. Beginning in 2011, new computers will come installed with both Windows and Nova.

Software

The first version of Nova, called Baire, is based on Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux is a computer operating system built on top of the Linux kernel and based on the Portage package management system. It is distributed as free and open source software. Unlike a conventional software distribution, the user compiles the source code locally according to their chosen...

, while Nova 2.1 Desktop Edition is based on Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

. Nova Escritorio is UCI's office suite

Office suite

In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a collection of programs intended to be used by knowledge workers...

 meant to replace Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...

.