http://news.northxsouth.com Free software and open source development news relating to Latin America, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia. Written in San Francisco, California. Fri, 09 May 2008 16:17:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Roberto Galoppini maintains a website described as "where business meets open source". He recently e-mailed us with some questions and then featured some info about North-by-South on his site. He articulates our model with some technical economic terms:Brazil and South America as a whole have an absolute advantage over USA ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/05/09/north-by-south-featured-on-open-source-business-analysis-website/ Hackerteen is a graphic novel that is generating a lot of buzz in California right now. And Hackerteen is also an educational project based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Hackerteen offers distance learning classes intended to share knowledge related to free software ethics, developing an entrepreneurial mindset and technology skill sets. ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/05/08/hackerteen-comic-showcases-unique-brazilian-school/ North-by-South is proud to announce the first in a series of articles that will document the Latin American free software movement in detail. We recently spoke with Marcos Mazoni, who made news last month when he was appointed as the new head of the federal Technical Committee for the Implementation ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/05/05/interview-with-marcos-mazoni-new-head-of-free-software-implementation-in-brazil/ There was a very nice write up about North-by-South today on Matt Asay's Open Road column at CNet. From the article: As the rates for Indian and Eastern European developers continues to climb, it may be wise to look south to Latin America. There are some exceptional open-source developers in or ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/05/05/near-shoring-development-to-latin-america/ We have written before about the large state of Kerala in India which has been one of the biggest regions supporting free software in the BRIC countries. Kerala is now set to be the first state in India to completely phase out Microsoft in favor of Linux as not only ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/05/03/schools-in-kerala-ready-for-switch-to-linux/ This chart has been floating around since Gustavo Duarte posted it on his blog a few days ago. These figures illustrate why the cost of living difference between the US and Latin America makes Microsoft a bad business concept for the region and also why North-by-South is a good one! ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/05/03/why-brazilians-like-free-software/ Fourteen cities in Ecuador participated in the recent Latin American Festival of Free Software Installation. A detailed report about the events in Ecuador, given the recent decree by President Rafael Correa, was published on Global Voices Online. http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/05/02/ecuador-weekend-of-free-software/ The Brazilian government has recently announced changes in the technological leadership of the country and observers expect that the appointment of Marcos Mazoni to lead the Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software will accelerate this process during the last two years of Lula's presidency. Mazoni has been the ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/04/28/marcos-mazoni-appointment-and-other-leadership-changes-in-brazil-free-software-migration/ There is an excellent article at Costa Rica Pages which talks about the challenges this small, Latin American country faces. Costa Rica only has a population of 4 million people and software piracy is a rampant problem there. Their vice-president, Laura Chinchilla, has said that "if the government legalized all ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/04/24/costa-rica-faces-software-related-challenges-that-open-source-can-solve/ One of the great announcements made at FISL this year was that the Brazilian Ministry of Education is currently in the process of deploying 53,000 computer labs with all open source software and 52 million students will have access to these labs. The computers in the labs will be running ... http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/04/24/brazilian-government-to-deploy-53k-open-source-labs-serving-52-million-students/