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.

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 in producing open source software, and as a matter of fact what is going on with the free software movement in Latin America is pretty peculiar.

An absolute advantage is a concept that comes out of economic theory and it is described on Wikipedia as:

A country has an absolute advantage over another in producing a good, if it can produce that good using fewer resources than another country. For example if one unit of labor in Scotland can produce 80 units of wool or 20 units of wine; while in Spain one unit of labor makes 50 units of wool or 75 units of wine, then Scotland has an absolute advantage in producing wool and Spain has an absolute advantage in producing wine.

And, this is true! One of the side benefits of the widespread adoption of free software by Latin American governments is that they are developing the absolute advantage that their countries have in developing open source software and North-by-South, through 10+ years of collaboration within the region, is uniquely positioned to give companies in O Norte access to this advantage. Thank you, Roberto!