The latest FLOSS Weekly includes an interview with Fernanda Weiden (She is a participant of Debian Women and Organiser of the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL) and a founder of Women in Free Software Project in Brazil). You can listen to the show, hosted by Randal Schwartz.

This one is just too good to ignore. We at northxsouth have speculated for a while that 2008 will be the year that near-shoring really takes off in Latin America and we plan to be right there, helping it happen.

If you still need convincing, try this on for size — India-based outsourcing companies are now out-sourcing their work to Latin America! India’s Tata Consultancy Service has begun opening offices in Uruguay — and has incredibly expanded to 5,500 employees throughout Latin America. The same reasons we’ve been talking about are cited: better time zone difference, Latin American business culture is more similar to US business culture than India, etc. You might have to register to read the whole article but it is worth the read.

For as long as many people can remember, mathematicians have been held hostage by closed, proprietary software that they need to do their work. Almost everyone loosely associated with academic math or stats know about Matlab or Mathematica — closed software that takes advantage of their monopoly with outrageous licensing fees of several thousand dollars. Not only that, but in order to protect their proprietary code, certain calculations have to run “blind,” an absurdity in the mind of an academic who is obsessed with peer review.

But the days of that monopoly are numbered. In the next week or two, mathematicians will be attending the joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America in San Diego. And at this meeting, an international group of developers will debut their free software program, Sage, which intends to become the “best mathematical software in the world” — and given free software development methodologies, this goal is entirely achievable.

Once again, free software will shake the very foundations of yet another industry and academic institution. There is always so much for us to be proud about as free software supporters!

This will be the first post 2008 but might as well start things off with more news about governments around the world opting for free software over the choices they are stuck with: piracy or unreal licensing fees. Vietnam has issued another recommendation urging a migration to open source, free software:

Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communication has recommended government agencies use open source software when using state moneys to implement information technology projects, local newspaper Vietnam News reported Friday. The ministry has issued a list of open source software, including OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox and Unikey.