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.