The 10th edition of the Free Software International Forum (FISL), the biggest event of free software in Latin America and maybe one of the biggest in the world, starts today in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

North by South has been invited to speak at the mega-conference, and we will host a panel about our unique business model, on Saturday, 06/27. We will also be hanging out with the developers of our network and meeting people we work with online everyday and enjoying this very special edition of FISL.

Just a few weeks before the event, the portal SoftwareLivre.org launched a new version of their site with a new software, a social network free software system developed with Ruby by our friends from COLIVRE, a free software coop. The name of it is noosfero and it would be great if every country could use such a tool to get all LUGs together, closer. Another cool tool is @FISL, developed by Vida Nerd (Nerd’s Life). They decided to create this tool “just because they love the event.” Vida Nerd is a platform where the user can login via a Twitter account and see which panels friends are attending or what they have planned to do and which panels have more people attending so you can see the most popular ones.

FISL10 will have over 7,000 participants, including the President of Brazil, Lula da Silva! NXS will be posting photos, a translation of Lula’s comments at FISL and more information on the morning of Saturday, the last official day of the conference.

As mentioned before on this news site (US firewall exposed by bloggers from countries like Cuba or Syria), the embargo laws in the United States have a direct impact on information technology development in the affected countries. Now, a blog from Cuba has reported that Google Wave is blocked for Cuban internet users.

The article (Spanish only) goes even deeper and itemizes other examples of how the USA embargo affects the IT development in Cuba. Here is a translation of some of the cases:

• An English travel agent, Steve Marshall, lives in Spain and sells travel packages to tropical destinations, including Cuba. In October 2007, about 80 of their web sites surprisingly stopped working, as a result of an action by the U.S. Government. The Treasury Department stated that eNom Company had not acted in accordance with the law, as the agency helped Americans evade restrictions on traveling to Cuba and was “generating resources used by the Cuban regime.” Among the domain names that were shut down include www.cuba-hemingway.com (a site about literature), www.cuba-havanacity.com on Cuban history and culture and other support services for tourists from Italy and France, such as www.ciaocuba.com and www.bonjourcuba.com.
• The Institute of Scientific and Technological Information (IDICT) was affected significantly, when it was denied access to the Database Premier Academy with eBooks from Taylor & Francis Publishing. It was launched in 1996 as a central database for researchers in the fields of science, technology and medicine.
• In 2008, access to new versions of the database engine free software used all around the world, MySQL, remained limited, as also happens with Java, after they were purchased by the US corporation Sun Microsystems.

Carlos Martínez, the author of the article, also lists some websites that express the blockade against Cuba and other countries between them. The most famous ones include: Cisco Systems, Oracle Technology Network, Telefónica Spain and the Total Bank, an online banking and payment services, banking and business credit cards company.

The good side of it, according to Carlos, is that the Cuban users will have to look for alternatives to Microsoft Messenger and Google Wave tools in the free software communities. But by doing so, the users will gain more security, privacy and software freedom. He says:

Technically, although Cuba is living these prohibitions as a disadvantage compared with other Internet users, this blockade will force the Cubans to use messaging services libres (i.e. Jabber), giving them more security and privacy.