Software Free

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.

Let's face it, open source software runs the Internet. Without it we wouldn't have basic services like DNS, or even the web server that's sending you this page. This isn't a new phenomenon. People have been writing and distributing OSS software since the Internet was born. I'm always amused when people characterize it as a new-fangled thing.

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The signatories of this petition, representing a Community for Freedom of Choice and Market in the European Union, draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warns about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and calls for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability.

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"...On 26 june a prophet came to CERN. Complete with long hair and a bushy unkempt, Richard Stallman looked every bit the part. His message was software should be free. [...] The year that Stallman came to CERN, Tim had published a note in a CERN computing newsletter drawing the laboratarie's attention to GNU. [...] «When we speak of free software ... we are refrerring to freedom, not price».

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## In this issue
* Free Software Supporter exclusive: WBUR is streaming Ogg Vorbis!
* DBD Action Alert - Libraries: Eliminate DRM!
* Get DeltaH, gNewSense 2.0
* Get your next machine with gNewSense
* Silicon Mechanics to ship servers with free BIOS preinstalled
* Can we rescue OLPC from Windows? by Richard M. Stallman
* End Software Patents: the Bilski hearing, heard.

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"Why should we care to have a 100 per cent free operating system? Isn't being almost free enough? Not if you value freedom itself.

The Free Software Movement was founded to win freedom for software users. Its offshoot, Open Source, was founded to downplay freedom as a value. This difference, which may seem subtle, has big consequences and this is one example of them..."

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

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.

RMS: «The EFF is fighting an attempt to twist copyright law to give the software developer total power over execution of the program. Victory in this case will not eliminate the practice of restricting how users run proprietary programs. It will only limit the developers to using contracts as the means. This will not make users free.

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Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, wrote about how Microsoft’s announcement to drop MSN music customers’ DRM tracks is right in line with their end-user license agreement or EULA.

When active, MSN Music’s webpage touted that customers could “choose their device and know its going to work”.

But when customers went to purchase songs, they were shown legalese that stated the download service and the content provided were sold without warrantee. In other words, Microsoft doesn’t promise you that the service or the music will work, or that you will always have access to music you bought. The flashy advertising promised your music, your way, but the fine print said, our way or the highway.

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Source: Digital Citizen

As an open-source supporter, I am glad to have the possibility, at my workplace, to work with software such as GNU/Linux, Firefox and many others…

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.

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Source: northxsouth : free software news from latin america

"The primary mission of GNU is freedom and social solidarity. We seek to help computer users by giving them software that respects their freedom and their community, so as to put an end to the practice of using proprietary software, which tramples both..."

"In 1984, Richard Stallman founded a social movement known as the free software movement. The free software movement fights for the ability to control our computers as a cooperative community (as opposed to being under the rule of software proprietors where users have only as much control over their computers as the proprietor allows).

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