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:

Open Veins of Latin America, a book originally written in 1971 by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano (with a revised edition released in 1997), was given to President Obama by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend and, as a result, has shot to the top of Amazon’s Bestseller List. Yesterday, it incredibly went all the way up to the #2 spot on Amazon’s list. At the time of this writing, the book is now #7 on the Bestseller List. Before President Chavez gave the book to Obama, it was the 54,295th most popular book on Amazon. While this news is a little off-topic for this website, we thought it was interesting enough to share.

Open Document Format (ODF) continues to gain global support and is now the standard for document formats for 16 national and 8 provincial governments, including Germany and Uruguay.

According to Jomar Silva, the ODF Alliance Brazil managing director, “ODF is steadily achieving continent-wide support in South America…”. ODF is currently used by the governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Misiones, a province in Argentina.

NXS News has supported and followed the progress of ODF as an emerging standard.

You can review the ODF Alliance Annual Report 2008 for more details.

If you can read Spanish, the Madrid-based newspaper Público has come out with a nice article which surveys the Latin American open source movement: Linux conquista América Latina. The article’s tagline is Los Gobiernos suramericanos impulsan el uso de software libre frente al propietario buscando independencia tecnológica, seguridad y desarrollo local, which translates as “South American governments boost the use of free software over proprietary software, searching for technological independence, security and local development.” Similar to North by South’s recent presentation at GOSCON, the article surveys the development of free software in each of the Latin American countries adopting free software: Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Cuba, Uruguay.

North by South will be presenting at this year’s Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON 2008) about the use of open source software by governments in Latin America: The Latin American Free Software Movement. The presentation will give updates about the latest public sector efforts in Central and South America including Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay. Having just returned from CONSEGI 2008 and continuing to keep in touch with contacts from all these countries, NXS will be able to provide the latest news about open source in Latin America.

GOSCON was established in 2005 as an annual conference to discuss the use of open standards and open source software in the public sector. The latest that we’ve heard is that Marcos Mazoni, head of the technical committee to implement free software in Brazil, will join a panel discussion through a video link. NXS will provide pictures and further updates from GOSCON 2008 from the conference itself as it goes on.