North Bridge Venture Partners recently conducted a survey of open source vendors and their customers and some of the results are relevant to the NXS business model:

1. The respondents overwhelmingly agreed that a general economic downturn would be good for open source businesses because of the cost savings inherent to free software. It seems obvious that the additional savings of near-shoring would bolster that opinion.
2. The respondents also speculated that web content management, web publishing and social software are the industry sectors which will be most impacted by the continuing ascent of open source software — and, as it happens, these are the exact areas that NXS specializes in.

In the years since the “big news” about the Brazilian government’s adoption of open source software and related hot stories, only here and there does the media report on the phenomenon happening in Brazil. Some of the conventional wisdom is that only smaller companies are switching to free software in Brazil to save on costs and be legitimate at the same time. However, it was recently reported that the Instituto Sem Fronteiras, a Brazilian research firm, found that 73 percent of companies with more than a thousand employees are open source users. Sao Paulo, Brazil, is at the center of the North-by-South Developers Network. As time goes on, free software is becoming institutionalized within Latin American businesses, public sector systems, non-profits and NGO’s.

Bazaar, a distributed version control system used by the northxsouth developers network, just became a GNU project. The news was announced in February by Martin Pool, manager of Bazaar development at Canonical.

Distributed VCS, for those who are new to the concept, offers a long list of resources for programmers, such as: the possibility to work offline without the need of a central VCS repository; makes it easy to create new branches; merging is easier for the release manager and more.

The San Francisco Community Colo celebrated its one year anniversary of the opening of their cabinets at their facility at 6th and Brannan in downtown San Francisco. Since there are also volunteers who do remote sysadmin work for SFCCP in Sao Paulo, Brazil, they held a simultaneous party there and the two parties were linked in all kinds of ways… audio, video, IRC. The whole event was super-geeky. And it was a lot of fun. So, there is a full debriefing of the party and there are pictures on the SFCCP Flickr account.

The northxsouth.com mailing lists have been migrated to our new server and the new lists are up and running.

• Announce List - if you are a client, developer, interested party, from the media or just a general fan, you should be on our low-volume announcement mailing list.
• Developers Network - If you are part of the northxsouth developers network, you should be on this list so you can receive new project announcements. Optionally, you can also be on the general developers discussion list to talk with fellow developers about anything.