Roberto Galoppini maintains a website described as “where business meets open source”. He recently e-mailed us with some questions and then featured some info about North-by-South on his site. He articulates our model with some technical economic terms:

Brazil and South America as a whole have an absolute advantage over USA in producing open source software, and as a matter of fact what is going on with the free software movement in Latin America is pretty peculiar.

An absolute advantage is a concept that comes out of economic theory and it is described on Wikipedia as:

A country has an absolute advantage over another in producing a good, if it can produce that good using fewer resources than another country. For example if one unit of labor in Scotland can produce 80 units of wool or 20 units of wine; while in Spain one unit of labor makes 50 units of wool or 75 units of wine, then Scotland has an absolute advantage in producing wool and Spain has an absolute advantage in producing wine.

And, this is true! One of the side benefits of the widespread adoption of free software by Latin American governments is that they are developing the absolute advantage that their countries have in developing open source software and North-by-South, through 10+ years of collaboration within the region, is uniquely positioned to give companies in O Norte access to this advantage. Thank you, Roberto!