Over 800 people were in attendance in Brasilia for the opening ceremony of CONSEGI as more people continued to stream in throughout the day. According to Sandra Sipp (Coordinator of Social Communication for SERPRO) over 2000 people registered to attend the conference, including high-ranking Brazilian officials such as Minister of Science and Technology Sérgio Rezende, Minister of the General Secretary of the Presidency Luiz Dulci and many other government officials from all over Latin America. The event is free and open for everyone and on the first floor is an all-Linux computer lab. There is also an on-going workshop showing people how to recycle computers by replacing hardware and using free software.

This event is a unique free software gathering in that it is bringing together public officials who have been working hard to implement free software solutions within their governments as a way to benefit society at large. One of the major topics in the debates and panels is how IT solutions can be used to create more transparency between the state and the public it is supposed to serve. These initiatives promote democracy in a way that is truly foreign to many people in the United States in that they use technology to give citizens easy access to information about government funding and work, allowing them to follow it and be a part of the political process that affects their lives.

The second day of CONSEGI includes 14 workshops, a panel about Digital Inclusion projects and presentations about using free software for remote education projects.

Several of us from the North by South core management team in San Francisco are heading to Brasília, the capital of Brazil, to participate in CONSEGI 2008, the International Congress of Electronic Society and Government, happening August 27 - 29, and we’ll be making daily blog updates about our experiences there. CONSEGI is exclusively about free software implementation by Latin American governments and there will be representatives from countries all over the region. Many of the programmers in the North by South Developers Network have worked extensively in open source migration and development projects for the governments and state-owned IT firms where they live.

There will be a panel about long distance education systems, to discuss projects like PROINFO from the Brazilian Ministry of Education, a decentralized project to build IT labs inside of state schools to facilitate the education process. Digital inclusion will also be discussed in-depth, led by the well-known Brazilian project maintained by GESAC, which has over 3 thousand computer labs around the country receiving satellite internet, all using free software techonology. There will be workshops on specific software packages, like Asterisk as well as programming languages like PHP.

Many government organizations will be presenting their own unique implementations of free software, including public officials from Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba and more. Other important topics include the Open Document Format and free software licenses. The goal is to not only assist organizations who are migrating to open source but also to create international debate on these topics, especially after the recent approval of Microsoft’s Open XML as an ISO standard, a move that had been opposed by open source and free software advocates everywhere and fought within the standards organization by countries that suffer from proprietary software (including Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, India). North by South will be interviewing some of the participants and updating the site with news during the event.

North by South will be providing daily English-language updates during CONSEGI and posting pictures. Please check back here for continued updates!

Continuing our series of bringing information about the free software movement in Latin America to English readers, North by South interviewed Cláudio Filho (original in Portuguese), one of the people responsible for starting the OpenOffice.org project in Brazil (pt-BR), known in the country as BrOffice.org. The project started around 2002 and the community in Brazil who supports it has done some great work not only to provide a high-quality office suite to Brazil’s citizens but to also do their part on the nation-wide movement for digital inclusion and promoting free software.

To get a picture of how seriously this project is taken in Brazil, take a look at these quotes from the ‘Official Journal’ (where all the activities of the government, i.e. laws, plenaries, resolutions, auctions etc, are recorded). These quotes are from the federal High Council of Labour Justice and the Superior Court of Work:

“Art. 1º Gives preference to open source programs free of reservations of right owners, as the conditions of its use, modification, full use, access to source code, distribution, customization and, crucially, without cost of acquiring licenses.”

Following this new requirement of the High Council, they continue:

“Art. 4º It is defined as a pattern of use in the bodies of Justice Labour the office suites “BrOffice complying with the provisions of art. 3, I and II of this Act.”

This is affirmed in practice by articles on BrOffice’s website, describing how the Digital Program of Paraná State has installed 40,000 copies of BrOffice.org at 2,000 state schools, which is 95.24% of the schools of in the state of Paraná. Another impressive number is that the House of Representatives of Brazil saved R$5 Million (USD$3 Million) by adopting BrOffice.org as their office suite.

Last week, a law case that started in San Francisco came to a conclusion in favor of free software supporters. Robert Jacobsen wrote a Java software system for controlling model railroads known as JMRI, which was released under the Artistic license. Jacobsen accused the firm Katzer/Kamind of copying and incorporating part of the free software created by him in a non-free derivative product without respecting the license rules.

The question was whether or not the original creator could sue under copyright law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C ruled in his favor. It has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code (i.e under GPL, CC or similar licenses) can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material.

That is a great victory for the free software supporters because the most important thing to keep the movement growing is that the 4 freedoms are respected, so that software can be free if it is modified, re-used, distributed, etc. For the community, who builds this software, the recognition of the work doesn’t come as money (with exceptions of course) but by retaining the credit and rights to the authors. A history of the case can be found at the JMRI website.

The UTUTO Project is a non-profit volunteer organization that incubates other free software/knowledge projects from Argentina. They maintain a GNU/Linux distribution all translated to Spanish, they keep their own packages repository and you can search for packages on their site. The UTUTO community also maintains various documentation projects as well as a multimedia server.

Their distribution, UTUTO XS, is used in many countries in Latin American and also in Spain, it can be found at public computer labs, inside government officies or at the universities. North by South interviewed Daniel Oliveira who is part of the community that keeps UTUTO project going in Argentina and you can read it in English or the original in Spanish.