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.

We are happy to have released the announcement about the close of our round of funding with our investment partner, Launch Capital LLC. From the press release:

Backed by government support of open source software in Latin American countries like Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and others, a wave of free software enthusiasm is sweeping across the southern hemisphere. A generation of tech-savvy Latin American programmers exhibit all the best qualities of open source programmers: passion for software development, meticulous attention to detail and a thorough understanding of the inner-workings of operating systems, databases and web platforms.

You can read the entire press release on our website: Open Source Software Company Provides Near-Shore Services from the Latin American Free Software Movement

The power of the distributed commons! Our interview with Marcos Mazoni, new head of the technical committee to implement free software in Brazil, which we published in English and Portuguese, has been independently translated by people we don’t know into Spanish and Vietnamese.

Independent of that interview, Linux Magazine Online in Brazil has written a nice piece about North-by-South: Empresa de Código Aberto investe na América Latina.

In addition to an impressive domestic free software initiative, Brazil is increasingly exporting open source government solutions to other countries. An upcoming example of this is Brasil Tech 2008, being held in Johannsburg, South Africa. The 2-day conference will cover topics like: “How Brazilian technological advances can be adapted to South Africa’s needs” and “the successful use of Open Source software in Brazil’s public administration and the feasibility of sharing these programmes with the South African government”. In his recent interview with us, Brazil’s head of free software implementation indicated that co-operation with other governments and exporting their open source policies was one of their goals.