This year has already seen the second release of gNewSense, the completely free distribution endorsed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and the announcement that Ubuntu will have a free software option as part of its installation program.

"Latin America is emerging as a real hotbed of not only free software coding, but free software uptake by governments - to an extent that puts the UK's pathetic bumblings in this area quite to shame." Glyn Moody interviews Ryan Bagueros of northxsouth.com about the Latin American free software revolution and North-by-South, a company that is giving US businesses access to this incredible phenomeno

"Just returning from the LibrePlanet 2009 conference, I had the opportunity to talk to some of the most hardcore software freedom advocates and see their reactions to the single largest regional implementation of free software in the real world anywhere on earth, in Latin America..."

The Free Software Foundation - Latin America is currently fighting two battles.

"...Shorter time differences, better English speakers, the Latin American free software movement producing masses of quality programmers..."

Three free softwares developed in Latin America are between the finalists of the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. They are Elastix from Ecuador, Medical from Argentina and Process Maker from Bolivia. We already published about Elastix here at our blog and we will be publishing more information about Medical and Process Maker.

This blog entry on Matt Asay's Open Road blog at C-Net talks about the emerging advantages to off-shoring development to Latin America, because of the incredible free software movement happening there and the benefits over far-away development to "code factories" in India or Eastern Europe.

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.

FLISOL - The Latin American Festivals of Installation of Free Software are install fests organized by the regional free software communities since 2005. The event is the largest distributed free software event in the world — last year, there were install fests in more than 200 cities in 18 countries in Latin America.