As countries around the world modernize their public elections process, the big problem with electronic voting machines is that the market is moving slow to provide equipment which fulfills all of the requirements for a fully democratic election. In many cases, printed proof of a citizen’s vote is still needed, in case the machine has buggy software or if there is suspicion of fraud.
Read more »Improving the democratic process with free software e-voting
Brazil begins using the Open Document Format
The Brasília Protocol (now translated to English) started the process of implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) within the Brazilian Government.
Read more »Interview with Daniel Oliveira from the UTUTO project in Argentina
The UTUTO Project is a non-profit volunteer organization that incubates other free software/knowledge projects from Argentina. They maintain a GNU/Linux distribution all translated to Spanish, they keep their own packages repository and you can search for packages on their site. The UTUTO community also maintains various documentation projects as well as a multimedia server.
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BrOffice, the Brazilian OpenOffice, with a life of its own
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.
Read more »Free Software Foundation Latin America: Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the GNU project
"Few people had access to computers back when Richard Matthew Stallman realized the then-nascent software industry was adopting a business model based on denying software users their four essential freedoms, and that he could do something about it.
Read more »CONSEGI 2008 made free software history
In retrospect, CONSEGI 2008 was a historical event. There were representatives from all over the Americas (including 2 from the US!) -- more Latin American national free software movements were born there as mature ones led. NXS has pulled together a number of links about CONSEGI 2008.
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Glyn Moody & the Latin American Free Software Revolution
"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
Read more »University of Havana Finally Switches to Free Software
"About a year ago, we had spoken with Richard Stallman about the free software movement in Latin America and he said something which was surprising: even though free software was extremely popular in Cuba, it was receiving heavy resistance from Cuban academics and the university system in Cuba. Well, an announcement this week indicates that this has finally changed: ..."
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Near-shoring open-source development to Latin America with North-by-South
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.
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Interview with Marcos Mazoni, new head of free software in Brazil
Last month, President "Lula" da Silva appointed open source veteran Marcos Mazoni as the new head of the federal committee for free software implementation. This interview gets more detail from Mazoni about his experiences managing free software migrations at some of Brazil's biggest IT companies.
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Ecuador: A Weekend of Free Software Throughout the Country
"Throughout Latin America the “Latin American Festival of Installation of Free Software” (FLISOL 2008) recently concluded. This event, which has been held since 2005, has as its main objective to promote the use of free software, presenting its philosophy, its scopes and development.
Read more »UNESCO promotes use of free software in Latin America and the Caribbean
"...According to Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, who wrote an introduction article for the book, the society «needs information that is truly available to its citizens - for example, programmes that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate» ..."
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Free Software in Latin America
"...Shorter time differences, better English speakers, the Latin American free software movement producing masses of quality programmers..."
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FSF Latin America Experiences Revival
Blue GNU interviews Alexandre Oliva to learn about Free Software Foundation - Latin America. After a bit of a stuttering start, the FSFLA is definitely well under way and making strong progress.
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