FLISOL - The Latin American Festivals of Installation of Free Software are install fests organized by the regional free software communities since 2005. The event is the largest distributed free software event in the world — last year, there were install fests in more than 200 cities in 18 countries in Latin America.

The goal of the event is to promote the use of free software, so the general public can know its philosophy, install GNU/Linux on their computers, learn about the applications and understand how they are developed by volunteer communities. Every install fest is free of charge in every location and they also include lectures, presentations and workshops.

Check out the list of countries hosting the event:

Inspired by the decision of the government of Munich to migrate to open source software, Scott Morris has compiled an impressive list of migrations to open source from around the world. You should take a look at his entire list (almost 100 examples) but some of the highlights, relevant to us, include the governments of Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Japan, Norway, Israel, China, Spain, Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, France, Austria and a bunch more. He also lists some major corporations including the Royal Bank of Scotland, the biggest bank in China, Amazon, the US Postal Service, Telstra, DoCoMo, Travelocity, Tommy Hilfiger, NASA and a lot more of these, too. The open source momentum just keeps on going.

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.

More and more mainstream software engineering institutions are picking up on what we’ve been saying for the past 2 years: South America is a hot-bed of software engineering and software business innovation. Dr Dobbs Journal, which has been publishing its magazine for programmers since 1976, has just published an in-depth look at the Latin American phenomenon.

This article takes particular note of Brazil, which is where northxsouth has its Latin American headquarters. 2008, as we’ve predicted, should be the year when this trend really takes off, and northxsouth is positioned to be at the forefront of collaboration with Latin America for web-based software development, having done open source development work with Latin America for over 8 years.

As an exporter of software, South America generally is a player and is growing at a double-digit rate. Outsourcing relationships with South American companies are already big business, and often a smart decision for North American companies. IDC identifies Latin America, which also includes Mexico and Central America, as having a pool of software developers essentially equal to Central and Eastern Europe, a region that many consider a hotbed of software talent.

This post links to an article that is already from January 1, 2008! From the Economic Times of India, there are 5 megatrends of 2008 and northxsouth.com is set up to take part in all of them. The trends are: fast growth in the BRIC+9 countries — “Brazil, Russia, India, China followed by Mexico, Poland, Turkey, Argentina, Columbia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, UAE, and Vietnam”. And software services is another. Social networking websites and beyond (our experience in developing user-generated growth technology goes back to the pioneering days of early Tagged.com). Service-oriented architecture. And, of course, open source software! Also, see this recent nxs post about near-sourcing to Latin America. The time has come to quit ignoring the potential of the Latin American free software revolution / phenomenon. We are ready to make it happen in 2008.