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.

Debian Day, also known as D Day is here (August 16) and many cities around the world are organizing events to celebrate it. The annual Debian Conference, or debconf, is happening right now in Mar del Plata, Argentina. You can follow the conference by video stream.

The good news is that the one of the proposals for the location of debconf10 is Margarita Island, Venezuela. The other two options are Boston or New York, both in the USA. Knowing the issues people from the south have when trying to get a visa to come to the USA and also the risk of laptop seizure every time Latin Americans enter the US (not to mention the currency exchange) - for someone from the south to go to USA or Europe, it’s much more expensive and risky than for someone from those areas to go to any country in Latin America. It would be a wise choice if they pick Venezuela, especially because of the very active FOSS community this country has and all the great support the government has put into free software/free knowledge projects. If you want to check out the conference for next year, it will be at Junta de Extremadura in Spain.

If you are in Argentina, you should also check out the Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre, happening on August 20, 21 and 22 in Buenos Aires. The event is one of the major free software events in Latin America and this year’s edition will feature presentations by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall and Mark Shuttleworth.

A proposed new law that restricts the freedom internet use in Brazil has already passed the Senate and is dangerously close to going on the books. The law, created by Senator Azeredo PSDB, restricts things like open wifi networks, forces ISP’s to keep user information for 3 years and gives ISP’s the ‘green light’ to open and look at packages coming from P2P user’s connection to check for copyright violations, and the list goes on and on.

The Free Software movement from Brazil is striking up against this project and they have a petition online against it. The FSF from Latin America has released an announcement about it, the Free Software Project of Brasil (http://softwarelivre.org) is also covering the process and participating on the campaign against the law project from Azeredo. Known bloggers and advocates of free software in Brazil are also taking part, like Sérgio Amadeu (who used to be head of the IT Institute of Brazil’s Federal Government), who has blogged a lot about how the law could be interpreted and will affect the freedoms of internet users in Brazil.

It is quite of a big surprise to see such law coming from a government that has defended the use of Free Software, supported the Creative Commons license inside of its Ministry of Culture and promoted initiatives of digital inclusion and knowledge sharing. Hopefully, the proposed legislation will be blocked and internet users from Brazil will not have to be worry about being monitored by packet sniffing by ISP’s. Otherwise, Brazil will become one of the biggest users of TOR, a free software that provides anonymity online.

Globant is, strictly speaking, a competitor of North by South, but we believe there is enough space in this market that we view them as a potential partner. The reason to bring them up at all is that Globant’s CEO, Martin Migoya, recently wrote an article for IndustryWeek about the advantages of near-shoring technology development to Latin America and we agree with a lot of what he writes about. It seems like North by South has grown more out of the open source movement in Latin America whereas Globant’s technology is focused primarily on using open source tools to build products with Java and .NET (which, in general, NXS doesn’t really work with). Globant also is headquartered in Argentina, with offices in Massachusetts and London. NXS is headquartered in San Francisco, with our second headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil. NXS, as a company, believes that other organizations bridging the North/South gap are keyed into trends that will only grow stronger as markets in BRIC countries continue to rapidly expand.

The BBC has become a forum for Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation, to criticize Bill Gates and the legacy he will leave on the world. Mr Stallman argues that Bill Gates’ philanthropy to developing nations can’t make up for all the damage caused to them by Microsoft:

Microsoft would have us believe that helping your neighbour is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship. The most important thing that Microsoft has done is to promote this unjust social system. Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software […] Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now. Dismantling them is up to us.

Great minds think alike and this news site made similar observations after Bill Gates tried to spin Microsoft as an organization that actually helps developing nations.