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North by South is pleased to inform that a member of our team Isabela Fernandes was invited to lead the Medical Project in Brazil. Medical is a GPL Hospital Information System created by the GNU Solidario project. North by South News wrote about Medical in 2009, at the time, with only one year of existence, they were finalists for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards at the category ‘ Best Government Software ‘. Medical is being used at clinics in the rural area from the north of... Read Full Story

An annual survey conducted by CETIC (Center for Study of Information Technology & Communications) found that the use of free software in mid-sized and enterprise companies continued to grow through 2009. The survey, TIC Empresas 2009 , has been surveying commercial trends in Brazil’s growing technology markets for five years now. While government adoption of free software is ordered by presidential decree, voluntary commercial adoption continues to grow in Brazil . The survey found that... Read Full Story

North by South (NXS) is excited to be attending the SMASH Summit that’s happening in San Francisco this week. Among a number of unique qualities that differentiate NXS from most other off-shoring companies, one important distinction is the collective experience of our core management team based in San Francisco. Our group includes veterans who have worked up through the trenches of breakneck-paced software engineering, product development (when sometimes that meant figuring out what the... Read Full Story

The momentum of the Latin American free software movement is accelerated every year by the International Free Software Forum , held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Last year, North by South was invited to speak at fisl10 , where a decade of free software revolution was celebrated. NXS gave a presentation about our business model and we were honored to be included in the special audience for President Lula da Silva’s address to the free software world . This year, we’re happy to help spread the... Read Full Story

After many discussions with private telecommunication companies, government institutions, civil society and LAN-house owners, the federal government of Brazil officially launched the National Broadband Plan on May 5. Between 2010 and 2014, an investment of R$ 15 billion Reais (about $8.5 billion USD) will bring broadband to 4,600 Brazilian municipalities and provide internet to 75% of Brazilian households. The plan will reactivate the dormant optical fiber network from an old state company... Read Full Story

Since 1988, the Office of the United States Trade Representative has released an annual Special 301 Report which “examines in detail the adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights” for every country in the world. The intention is to classify countries that either encourage or turn a blind eye to intellectual property piracy and countries can be put on a “Watch List” or “Priority Watch List”. This designation can then be used to pressure countries during trade negotiations... Read Full Story

The Brazilian federal government has launched a new version of their portal, offering more than 500 online services to Brazilian citizens, built entirely with free software. The new design and layout looks great and, in honor of the release, NXS is providing a translation of the press release about the launch. Translated from Portal Brasil: um novo conceito de comunicação (March 5, 2010) by North-by-South: “The Brazil Portal marks a new stage in the communication from the State with society... Read Full Story

On January 25th, SourceForge.net published a post on their official blog explaining that they were denying SourceForge services and site access to users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited people from those countries from accessing their website but they only began enforcing the condition a week before... Read Full Story

For a long time now, NXS/San Francisco folks have begged, pleaded and cajoled our local government to follow the example set by Latin America to mandate a switch to free software whenever the taxpayers are footing the bill. After all, this is San Francisco! We have more free software user groups than many small countries ! Well, finally, San Francisco has taken a small step towards our goal of a free software government. It isn’t exactly what we wanted … but it sure does come close. On... Read Full Story

For a long time now, NXS has preached about the computer programmer demographic in Latin America. Our experience is that Latin America is filled with the “dream candidate” that companies are looking for in the US: someone who is a free software geek, has a passion for code, uses free software in their everyday life (meaning that their skill set is constantly being improved as part of day-to-day activities) and keeps up with all the latest trends and developments in the free software world... Read Full Story