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.

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.

In 2006, the United Nations produced a report called Breaking Barriers: The Potential of Free and Open Source Software for Sustainable Human Development. It was a compilation of case studies from around the world which described the impact of actual free software initiatives that made an impact in the developing world. It has come back into the news because an organization called Zea Partners has recently released supplemental case studies that they’ve been involved with, mostly centering around the use of Plone, a Python-based CMS that many of the NXS developers have implemented for the Brazilian government. This is a great idea — to take the original United Nations document which describes case studies and, in a distributed way, keep it updated with supplemental reports about case studies. Many of the side projects that NXS developers are involved with could be put together in a report like this and we are currently discussing doing exactly what Zea Partners has done. This “living compilation” of case studies could go on and on, showing to the world the incredible impact of open source and free software.

About a year ago, we had spoken with Richard Stallman about the free software movement in Latin America and he said something which was surprising: even though free software was extremely popular in Cuba, it was receiving heavy resistance from Cuban academics and the university system in Cuba. Well, an announcement this week indicates that this has finally changed: “After years of deliberation, the University of Havana has finally decided to switch over to free software on its network of computers, virtually all of which are running the Windows operating system, produced by United States software giant Microsoft.” And, Yudivián Almeida, professor of computer at the University of Havana, this change means that “[w]hen free software has been installed on all of the university’s computers, it will make no sense to teach using anything else.” So, one more Latin American institution has made the conversion away from closed, proprietary software and towards open knowledge.