We’re very honored that Upside Down World contacted us and asked us if they could reprint our interview with Marcos Mazoni. Upside Down World is an interesting web magazine that covers Latin American news and politics (in English) with a perspective that is rarely seen in the corporate press in El Norte. UDW has been around since 2003 and is 100% reader-funded which eliminates its reliance on corporate sponsorship for funding (and, therefore, is probably a more accurate source of news!). Please check out Upside Down World and consider helping them with the good work they’re doing.

About a year ago, we had spoken with Richard Stallman about the free software movement in Latin America and he said something which was surprising: even though free software was extremely popular in Cuba, it was receiving heavy resistance from Cuban academics and the university system in Cuba. Well, an announcement this week indicates that this has finally changed: “After years of deliberation, the University of Havana has finally decided to switch over to free software on its network of computers, virtually all of which are running the Windows operating system, produced by United States software giant Microsoft.” And, Yudivián Almeida, professor of computer at the University of Havana, this change means that “[w]hen free software has been installed on all of the university’s computers, it will make no sense to teach using anything else.” So, one more Latin American institution has made the conversion away from closed, proprietary software and towards open knowledge.

We are happy to have released the announcement about the close of our round of funding with our investment partner, Launch Capital LLC. From the press release:

Backed by government support of open source software in Latin American countries like Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and others, a wave of free software enthusiasm is sweeping across the southern hemisphere. A generation of tech-savvy Latin American programmers exhibit all the best qualities of open source programmers: passion for software development, meticulous attention to detail and a thorough understanding of the inner-workings of operating systems, databases and web platforms.

You can read the entire press release on our website: Open Source Software Company Provides Near-Shore Services from the Latin American Free Software Movement

The power of the distributed commons! Our interview with Marcos Mazoni, new head of the technical committee to implement free software in Brazil, which we published in English and Portuguese, has been independently translated by people we don’t know into Spanish and Vietnamese.

Independent of that interview, Linux Magazine Online in Brazil has written a nice piece about North-by-South: Empresa de Código Aberto investe na América Latina.

In addition to an impressive domestic free software initiative, Brazil is increasingly exporting open source government solutions to other countries. An upcoming example of this is Brasil Tech 2008, being held in Johannsburg, South Africa. The 2-day conference will cover topics like: “How Brazilian technological advances can be adapted to South Africa’s needs” and “the successful use of Open Source software in Brazil’s public administration and the feasibility of sharing these programmes with the South African government”. In his recent interview with us, Brazil’s head of free software implementation indicated that co-operation with other governments and exporting their open source policies was one of their goals.