This is a quick link to a post which summarizes how Linux has contributed to alleviating the symptoms of poverty throughout the world by providing a world-class, sophisticated operating system with all the internals available for review and study by students wishing to increase their understanding of how computers work.

“Speaking at the Second ODF Workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, yesterday, Carlos Gonzalez of the National Center of Information Technologies, announced that the Venezuelan government had formally adopted ODF as a standard for the ‘processing, exchange and storage of documents’.” Venezuela joins a number of other countries who have adopted this open standard, along with Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Belgium — overall, fourteen national and eight provincial governments. The Open Document Format is a file format for office-related documents, such as word processing documents, spreadsheets, charts and presentations. It is currently implemented by office solutions such as OpenOffice, KOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony and Corel Wordperfect. In May 2008, Microsoft announced that Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007 would add native support for the Open Document Format.

As the doom and gloom of the global financial crisis continues, off-shoring (and, this time around, near-shoring companies) should expect to see an increase in revenues as IT and technology verticals reform their organizations towards cost-cutting. Especially as near-shoring to Latin America takes off as a trend, the unique Latin American financial structure provides it some immunity to the effects of the global repercussions of the US crisis. This does not necessarily mean a decrease in opportunities for state-side technology workers — if they are prepared to adjust their roles into making near-shoring a viable solution for companies in the United States. Historically, during the dot-com crash, Indian outsourcers saw an increase in revenues. This could be even more true this time around if there is going to be a fundamental restructuring of how business is done. In fact, there is some prediction that even if US IT spending falls overall in 2008, off-shore spending will increase. And, everyone seems to agree that while Latin American exports will be hurt hard by the US economic problems, the newly-formed economic blocs in Latin America make it so that things will be very different from past economic downturns in the US, which automatically impacted Latin America negatively.

Brazilian state IT company SERPRO (US$ 1 billion annual revenue) has selected Debian GNU/Linux as their preferred distribution for its thousands of GNU/Linux development and production servers. The announcement occurred during Debian Day in Porto Alegre.

SERPRO has already started to work with the community, hearing suggestions on how to modify its internal culture to improve communication with the community and encourage employees to collaborate with the project for mutual benefits between the company (the largest state-owned IT firm in this hemisphere) and the open source community.

As part of a plan to increase the digital literacy in Venezuela by distributing computers to schools, Venezuela made an agreement with Portugal to buy one million Classmate laptops. The agreement includes the creation of a factory in Venezuela to build the computers. The Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology, Socorro Hernandez, reported that Portugal will deliver 500,000 computers during the first and second quarter of 2009. In the third quarter of 2009, the factory based in Venezuela will be completed and is expected to manufacture, initially, 500,000 more laptops. The bilateral arrangement with Portugal is valued at more than $3 billion, which includes delivering a million barrels of oil to Portugal.

The Classmate PC is a project created by Intel, more or less like the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). Portugal started to manufacture the PC’s in the country as part of a project to distribute computers for free or at the cost of 50 Euros to all their students. In Portugal, the computers are called “Magalhães” (in English, “Magellan”), named after the Portuguese maritime explorer. The computers come with a Atom N270 1.6GHz Processor, 512MB memory, built-in camera, built-in microphone and speakers, USB ports, and more. You can see all the specifications here. The ones that will be used in Venezuela will run the Venezuelan Debian distribution Canaima.