In the world of open source, there are all kinds of interesting differences. For the Euro 2008 finals, Spain versus Germany, our international open source community is, of course, interested in the outcome. And, with sports comes gambling. But, in this case, the bet was over who would take care of an outstanding list of to-do items on an open source project — in a timely fashion (over the next week)! So, the game is over, and the person who bet on Spain will certainly be happy to watch the person who bet on Germany clean up the to-do list over the next week. And, in these high-tech days, the games are watched on p2p television and an IRC bot reports all the latest scores to the IRC channel. It is also worth mentioning that an open source alternative to Betfair has been in the news lately: Smarkets! Now you can go play your favorite open source soccer/football game, like Eat the Whistle. These types of things are the best parts of the new world of globalization!

Using free software as a base, Las Tunas in Cuba is going to be the first city in Cuba to try out an experiment of bringing the entire community online. Plans include online education, electronic trade, debate forums and some municipal city functions. The project will also include training and education to build out this online city. Meanwhile, a blogger living in Cuba has engaged in a “war of words” with the Commandante himself, Fidel Castro (a demonstration of free speech?).

Open source programmers from the NXS Developers Network are going to be working on building fingerprints for Discovery, an open source tool that inventories open source applications running on any given machine and then reports back to a central server. This project is also looking for volunteers to help out! If you are particularly experienced with any given open source application, please consider contributing a fingerprint so that the tool can more thoroughly investigate each server that it runs on. This is an exciting project that will create a census of deployed open source applications in the real world! You can also check out the results to date.

Glyn Moody, one of open source’s most famous and meticulous historians, conducted an extensive interview with NorthxSouth that goes into a lot of detail about our company, our background, how we do things and where we’re going. Glyn Moody runs a blog called open-dot-dot-dot and he’s also a columnist for Computer World UK. Mr Moody has also written several books about open source — the most famous one is Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. This book chronicles the history of the beginning of the free software revolution and is an important primer for anyone involved with computer software. We strongly encourage everybody to check out his work and, of course, his interview with NXS!

Brazil is continuing to solidify its role as the leader of technology innovations for developing countries. As noted here on this site, Brazil is exporting its open source tech solutions at the Brasil Tech 2008 conference being held in South Africa. One such innovation is reconditioning old hardware and using free software to put them back into circulation in Brazilian schools. Secretary of Logistics and Information Technology at the Ministry of Planning, Rogerio Santanna dos Santos, explained that Brazil got the idea from a program in Canada and they began building Computer Reconditioning Centers: “The poor in Brazil were trained and employed in these reconditioning centres who would, in turn, provide the needy, public schools and universities with computers.” So, not only are Brazilian schools getting more computers, but people are being trained to work on the hardware.

Certainly, what helps make this possible is the flexibility of open source operating systems. Linux can be modified to run smoothly on older hardware without sacrificing any of the modern features of the desktop (GNOME or KDE). Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, requires powerful and expensive computers or it just won’t run. Also, Linux can be installed for free on recycled computers whereas Microsoft would still require the purchase of an expensive license. Brazil’s creativity in using free software to benefit their educational system continues to amaze.