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"Software Freedom Day, a celebration of Free Software and Open Source, announced tha the SFD group for Nicaragua won one of three top places worldwide for their efforts on bringing Open Source Software to the people.
In my last post, I talked about the migration of a rural community in northern Nicaragua to Ubuntu Linux. After a year’s hard work, one of the biggest government offices has begun to migrate their systems from proprietary software to FOSS alternatives.
While many today see Linux as a "just download it" or "just buy it" product, it hasn't always been that way. Installfests were actually the norm. Well, that's what is happening in Nicaragua. I received the following announcement in email—not from a geek mailing list but from the list of a social rights activists.
An experiment in Nicaragua shows just how powerful Open Source software can be in leveling the playing field. The second poorest country of the Americas now has one of the best software solutions for displaying agricultural data in the western hemisphere. It all started about a year ago.
The location and date of the annual Debian developers conference have been announced, the event will be held in Managua, Nicaragua in July 2012. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely.
Let's call that site the Geek Ranch. (When I say "let's" I mean us, not everyone. While its primary focus is to appeal to geeks, we will have to call it something else for general marketing.) As far as a site, it is about 265 acres of land in the mountains of the Tisey Preserve near Estelí, Nicaragua.
While there is a lot more to it than just being for geeks, here is the geek angle. The property will have "geek cabinas" scattered around a pine forest within the property. If you want to escape from the rat race for a while--a month, six months, whatever--you will be able to inexpensively rent a private cabina. It will come with Internet connectivity, maid service and all your meals. In other words, no routine responsibilities.
"Guardabarranco is the national bird of Nicaragua. It’s also the name of a public school that migrated to GNU/Linux back in 2005.
Nationwide, 175 public schools have computer labs, but only Guardabarranco uses Free Software. Their choice of distribution was GnuLinEx, based on Debian GNU/Linux and developed by the government of Extremadura, Spain..."
