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.

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.

Like the future, open source is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In particular, 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.

Open Source in the public sector seemed to be all the rage in 2008, with government agencies all over Europe — not to mention agencies of the EU itself — adopting, and in many cases, mandating Open Source software and standards.

Continuing our series of bringing information about the free software movement in Latin America to English readers, North by South interviewed Cláudio Filho (original in Portuguese), one of the people responsible for starting the OpenOffice.org project in Brazil (pt-BR), known in the country as BrOffice.org.

"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

Open-source software developers are seeing a lot of interest in their products in Europe -- but it's North American companies that are opening their checkbooks, said speakers at Paris Capitale du Libre, a conference organized by the Federation of Open Source Software Industry.

The Collaborative Network for Free and Open Software Latin American and Carib (RCSLA) is a network created at the end of 2005 by the United Nations Development Program and UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil) to increase sharing of practical knowledge and experience in deploying free software governance plans in Latin America.

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --