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!

Hackerteen is a graphic novel that is generating a lot of buzz in California right now. And Hackerteen is also an educational project based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Hackerteen offers distance learning classes intended to share knowledge related to free software ethics, developing an entrepreneurial mindset and technology skill sets. Hackerteen is a good example of the emerging open source culture in Brazil and demonstrates how the free software mindset impacts society-at-large. Hackerteen is available in English, Portuguese and Spanish. The free software movement in Latin America is preparing a new generation of computer programmers who will certainly have a major advantage over students from the United States, who get a very superficial technology education based on closed, proprietary software.

North-by-South is proud to announce the first in a series of articles that will document the Latin American free software movement in detail. We recently spoke with Marcos Mazoni, who made news last month when he was appointed as the new head of the federal Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software in Brazil. The interview mostly focuses on the efforts to migrate Brazil’s state-owned IT firms to open source software, as this is what Mr Mazoni has been working on for the past decade or so. Our next article in the series will look at Brazil’s Digital Inclusion program in greater detail. To read the interview with Mr Mazoni:

• Read the interview with Marcos Mazoni in English
• Read the interview with Marcos Mazoni in Portuguese

There was a very nice write up about North-by-South today on Matt Asay’s Open Road column at CNet. From the article:

As the rates for Indian and Eastern European developers continues to climb, it may be wise to look south to Latin America. There are some exceptional open-source developers in or from Mexico and Latin America (Miguel de Icaza being the most famous of them), and Latin American governments’ adoption of open-source software is only going to increase this. […] Perhaps most importantly, this is a team that groks the spirit and code of open source. I may just be optimistic on North-by-South because of my family’s affection for Latin America, but whatever the reason, I’d encourage you to take a look.

Matt “gets” the reason we’ve seen an opportunity here: the Latin American free software movement is creating experienced talent in near-by Latin America who can provide the services needed in the San Francisco Bay Area with a lower cost but increased return.

We have written before about the large state of Kerala in India which has been one of the biggest regions supporting free software in the BRIC countries. Kerala is now set to be the first state in India to completely phase out Microsoft in favor of Linux as not only their operating system of choice, but also as the only platform that students will be tested on for state examinations. According to K Anwar Sadath, the administrator in charge of the migration, it is the biggest mobilization of its kind:

Since last September, some 15 lakh students have been busy training on or migrating to free software on 40,000 computers put up in 2,832 high schools watched over by over 60,000 IT trained school teachers (some 86 private training institutions train the teachers) besides 161 master trainers and 5,600 school IT coordinators.