In the years since the “big news” about the Brazilian government’s adoption of open source software and related hot stories, only here and there does the media report on the phenomenon happening in Brazil. Some of the conventional wisdom is that only smaller companies are switching to free software in Brazil to save on costs and be legitimate at the same time. However, it was recently reported that the Instituto Sem Fronteiras, a Brazilian research firm, found that 73 percent of companies with more than a thousand employees are open source users. Sao Paulo, Brazil, is at the center of the North-by-South Developers Network. As time goes on, free software is becoming institutionalized within Latin American businesses, public sector systems, non-profits and NGO’s.

Bazaar, a distributed version control system used by the northxsouth developers network, just became a GNU project. The news was announced in February by Martin Pool, manager of Bazaar development at Canonical.

Distributed VCS, for those who are new to the concept, offers a long list of resources for programmers, such as: the possibility to work offline without the need of a central VCS repository; makes it easy to create new branches; merging is easier for the release manager and more.