Last month, President "Lula" da Silva appointed open source veteran Marcos Mazoni as the new head of the federal committee for free software implementation. This interview gets more detail from Mazoni about his experiences managing free software migrations at some of Brazil's biggest IT companies.

Continuing our series of bringing information about the free software movement in Latin America to English readers, North by South interviewed Cláudio Filho (original in Portuguese), one of the people responsible for starting the OpenOffice.org project in Brazil (pt-BR), known in the country as BrOffice.org.

"Brazil’s Tribunal Superior Eleitoral will use 430,000 GNU/Linux machines for this year’s election, according to a press release (pt) published on the TSE website (h/t Ada Lemos). Giuseppe Janino, the Tribunal’s secretary of IT, promises that this migration will make the elections more secure and transparent, reducing the potential for ballot rigging and tampering..."

"I participated in a panel discussion of Decoding Liberation at the Wolfe Institute at Brooklyn College yesterday. The book, written by Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, colleagues of mine at BC, is an important sociological, political and technical treatment of the free software movement..."

Blue Gnu Media & Technology launched Blue GNU, a news site focused on the Free Software movement. The company uses only Free Software for both its office and website.

"...With pleasure we invite everybody for the official launch of the Free Knowledge Institute. The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge..."

In August, we wrote about the Law Project from Senator Azeredo (PSDB) in Brazil that will restrict the freedom of internet users in Brazil.

A public, Congressional hearing about the current Brazilian data retention bill will happen on November 13th, 2008 after months of political pressure by the civil society, especially the Brazilian free software movement.

As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software.

According to major newspapers, starting with the municipal elections of 2008, Brazil’s e-voting machines will use the Linux operating system, to be developed by the technical team of the federal elections tribunal the TSE. According to the TSE’s IT division, the advantages of using Linux in the electronic voting machine are standardization, since it is possible to use this OS in all models of the device, as well as transparency, since this is an open mcchanism in which all the source code is available to the public and can be freely audited. Another advantage is zero cost, because no license fees must be paid.