Roberto Galoppini maintains a website described as “where business meets open source”. He recently e-mailed us with some questions and then featured some info about North-by-South on his site. He articulates our model with some technical economic terms: Brazil and South America as a whole have an absolute advantage over USA in producing open source software, and as a matter of fact what is going on with the free software movement in Latin America is pretty peculiar. An absolute advantage is... Read Full Story

Hackerteen is a graphic novel that is generating a lot of buzz in California right now. And Hackerteen is also an educational project based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Hackerteen offers distance learning classes intended to share knowledge related to free software ethics, developing an entrepreneurial mindset and technology skill sets. Hackerteen is a good example of the emerging open source culture in Brazil and demonstrates how the free software mindset impacts society-at-large. Hackerteen is... Read Full Story

North-by-South is proud to announce the first in a series of articles that will document the Latin American free software movement in detail. We recently spoke with Marcos Mazoni, who made news last month when he was appointed as the new head of the federal Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software in Brazil. The interview mostly focuses on the efforts to migrate Brazil’s state-owned IT firms to open source software, as this is what Mr Mazoni has been working on for the past... Read Full Story

There was a very nice write up about North-by-South today on Matt Asay’s Open Road column at CNet. From the article: As the rates for Indian and Eastern European developers continues to climb, it may be wise to look south to Latin America. There are some exceptional open-source developers in or from Mexico and Latin America (Miguel de Icaza being the most famous of them), and Latin American governments’ adoption of open-source software is only going to increase this. […] Perhaps most... Read Full Story

We have written before about the large state of Kerala in India which has been one of the biggest regions supporting free software in the BRIC countries. Kerala is now set to be the first state in India to completely phase out Microsoft in favor of Linux as not only their operating system of choice, but also as the only platform that students will be tested on for state examinations. According to K Anwar Sadath, the administrator in charge of the migration, it is the biggest mobilization of... Read Full Story

This chart has been floating around since Gustavo Duarte posted it on his blog a few days ago. These figures illustrate why the cost of living difference between the US and Latin America makes Microsoft a bad business concept for the region and also why North-by-South is a good one! It has found its way to both CNet and Slashdot (where, sadly, Commander Taco downplays the Brazilian free software movement by referring to a Linux.com article from a year ago which highlights a few negative... Read Full Story

Fourteen cities in Ecuador participated in the recent Latin American Festival of Free Software Installation. A detailed report about the events in Ecuador, given the recent decree by President Rafael Correa, was published on Global Voices Online. Read Full Story

The Brazilian government has recently announced changes in the technological leadership of the country and observers expect that the appointment of Marcos Mazoni to lead the Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software will accelerate this process during the last two years of Lula’s presidency. Mazoni has been the President of SERPRO, Brazil’s federally-owned data processing company, where he effectively managed a transition to open source software in most cases, and felt the... Read Full Story

There is an excellent article at Costa Rica Pages which talks about the challenges this small, Latin American country faces. Costa Rica only has a population of 4 million people and software piracy is a rampant problem there. Their vice-president, Laura Chinchilla, has said that “if the government legalized all its software licenses, we would have no funds left to build public housing or finance public education.” It is estimated that software companies lose $27 million from piracy in Costa... Read Full Story

One of the great announcements made at FISL this year was that the Brazilian Ministry of Education is currently in the process of deploying 53,000 computer labs with all open source software and 52 million students will have access to these labs. The computers in the labs will be running a Linux distribution called Linux Educacional which is based on Debian and KDE as a desktop. By the end of this year, there will already by 29,000 of these labs open and available! Each lab contains a server... Read Full Story