A couple weeks back, I headed down to Penguicon 6.0. It's a Linux convention, but also a Science Fiction convention. Really, it's like a geeky version of, "Hey your chocolate is in my peanut butter." My intention at the time was to record lots and lots of footage, so Linux Journal readers could get a real feel for the con, from the comfort of their local Internet feed.

Scouts honor — the 98-year-old Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization is adopting open-source software as a path to building better software to support the almost 3 million scouts and 1.1 million adults who make up the group.

KDE software has traditionally been strongest in Europe and South America. With the growth of events such as Camp KDE and many key contributors calling North America home, KDE is increasing its presence in this region.

Virgin America's Ravi Simhambhatla is delivering a keynote at this year's LinuxCon North America. He will be giving us the CIO view on how to sell the value of open source internally when cost isn't the only driving factor.

Portland is hosting 2500 software developers this week at the annual 'Open Source Convention.' They're attending tutorials with titles like: 'P-threads Programming;' and 'You Got JavaScript in my PHP.'

In short: there's an incredible free software movement happening in Latin America. To support this movement, North-by-South is a San Francisco-based business whose goal is to give businesses in Silicon Valley access to this pool of talent and to materially support the open source developers in Latin America.

In the old days, when Microsoft wanted to kill the Open Source Movement, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention was where you found true software revolutionaries. Great coders, they also were idealists who believed software was something you shared. Then a funny thing happened. Open source went mainstream.

We’ve partnered with Seneca College, one of the leaders in instituting open source software into its coursework, to bring Fedora to the classroom. Members of the Fedora Project team also went on the road last spring to talk to students and faculty at top computer science schools during the 2008 North America University Tour.

North-by-South is a network of open source developers from all over the Americas. We work with companies to ramp up any software project--starting from scratch or helping with your existing website or application, specializing in open source solutions and rapid timetables.