This post links to an article that is already from January 1, 2008! From the Economic Times of India, there are 5 megatrends of 2008 and northxsouth.com is set up to take part in all of them. The trends are: fast growth in the BRIC+9 countries — “Brazil, Russia, India, China followed by Mexico, Poland, Turkey, Argentina, Columbia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, UAE, and Vietnam”. And software services is another. Social networking websites and beyond (our experience in developing user-generated growth technology goes back to the pioneering days of early Tagged.com). Service-oriented architecture. And, of course, open source software! Also, see this recent nxs post about near-sourcing to Latin America. The time has come to quit ignoring the potential of the Latin American free software revolution / phenomenon. We are ready to make it happen in 2008.

You probably missed this one — but this little article from The Economic Times of India talks about efforts by the government’s Union Information Technology Ministry of India to promote education about free software. It talks about similar phenomenon we keep seeing — a rapid spread of free software user groups and state-sponsored promotion of open source for business and education.

All the reasons we think near-shoring to Latin America is a great idea is suddenly starting to dawn on corporations in the United States. Shorter time differences, better English speakers, the Latin American free software movement producing masses of quality programmers — all of this and more is what led us to turn our 10-year-old open source relationships with Latin America into a business that internet companies could tap into. If you want to be ahead of the game, then take notice of these ideas now spreading throughout business-oriented blogs:

Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil all have growing pools of IT talent. Neoris, the Miami-based IT consulting firm, is taking advantage of Latin America, noting the quality of talent is high, turn over is far less than in India, and Monterrey, Mexico, for example, is only an hour’s flight from Dallas. And many Latin American engineers speak better English than we do.

I became a fan of Eben Moglen when I saw this quote from him: “We also live in a world in which the right to tinker is under some very substantial threat. This is said to be because movie and record companies must eat. I will concede that they must eat. Though, like me, they should eat less.” This logic could be applied across the board in society! Computerworld recently featured an interview with Eben Moglen in which they discuss open source and free software.

This is an interesting interview with a professor involved in the Cuban free software movement. He makes an interesting argument which is that the free as in price argument is not a compelling argument for Cuba to switch to free software. Because of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, in the past, their government and universities have used pirated, unlicensed proprietary software by default. They have just openly violated the licensing restrictions — what is Microsoft going to do, sue them? :) So the Cuban free software movement is really built upon the belief of liberation and freedom and peer-reviewed code as a superior development methodology.