A YEAR AGO, Ron Hovsepian spoke about moving to the east. According to Reuters, he was bound to spend approximately $100 million on these moves. It obviously requires some great long-term savings to be able to reward him with a huge bonus [1, 2] despite a huge slump.

Marco Fioretti recently published an article (A look at free software in Ecuador) about his experiences at the Congress on Free Software and Democratization of Knowledge hosted in Quito, Ecuador. Rafael Bonifaz, a friend of North by South, is cited in the article talking about Elastix, a GNU/Linux distribution mostly developed in Ecuador.

When journalists and FOSS advocates explain why governments and corporations in the developing world are rapidly migrating to free software, a lot of focus is put on cost savings from licensing and removing the potential for liability from piracy within their organizations.

If you can read Spanish, the Madrid-based newspaper Público has come out with a nice article which surveys the Latin American open source movement: Linux conquista América Latina.

"Speaking at the Second ODF Workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, yesterday, Carlos Gonzalez of the National Center of Information Technologies, announced that the Venezuelan government had formally adopted ODF as a standard for the ‘processing, exchange and storage of documents’.” Venezuela joins a number of other countries who have adopted this open standard, along with Brazil, Uruguay, Sout

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.

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.