"Software Freedom Day, a celebration of Free Software and Open Source, announced tha the SFD group for Nicaragua won one of three top places worldwide for their efforts on bringing Open Source Software to the people.

In my last post, I talked about the migration of a rural community in northern Nicaragua to Ubuntu Linux. After a year’s hard work, one of the biggest government offices has begun to migrate their systems from proprietary software to FOSS alternatives.

Schools across Nicaragua are the latest part of this nation which is being digitally liberated

North-by-South is a network of open source developers from all over the Americas. We work with companies to ramp up any software project--starting from scratch or helping with your existing website or application, specializing in open source solutions and rapid timetables.

While many today see Linux as a "just download it" or "just buy it" product, it hasn't always been that way. Installfests were actually the norm. Well, that's what is happening in Nicaragua. I received the following announcement in email—not from a geek mailing list but from the list of a social rights activists.

The SFD Nicaragua 2009 event was a huge success! via Yader Velásquez

As businesses look to become less dependent on software vendors to solve their integration issues there is a groundswell of support for open source solutions. For companies already using open source, a survey of IT decision makers by Forrester earlier this year found that 51% were using it in mission-critical applications.

India’s open source software lobbyists allege that the country’s proposed draft recommendations for adopting open technology standards and software for automating different government departments and functions, favours popular software solutions from large companies such as Microsoft.

"Jalapa is a municipality in the Nueva Segovia Department of Nicaragua, which is located on the border of Honduras.[...]Today, the local government of Jalapa is making a strong bet on the future, migrating their workstations and servers to Free and Open Source Software, specifically Ubuntu Linux."