Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Ecuador’s Internal Revenue Service, SRI Ecuador, has developed a stable, secure and affordable platform for its Internet-based tax return project using a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Last April (April-29-2010) there was a local event in Ecuador organized by AESoft, the Ecuadorian Software association. This event was names “Integrated Technologies” and was sponsored by Microsoft, CodePlex, Port25 and The Apache Foundation. On this conference Microsoft sent a message saying that they are Open Source friendly and they support Open Source development.

Marco Fioretti recently published an article (A look at free software in Ecuador) about his experiences at the Congress on Free Software and Democratization of Knowledge hosted in Quito, Ecuador. Rafael Bonifaz, a friend of North by South, is cited in the article talking about Elastix, a GNU/Linux distribution mostly developed in Ecuador.

Linux is used as a server all the time. From branch-offices using Linux and Samba to Google running, well everything, on Linux, it's the operating system for choice for most businesses. Except that is, for small offices. There, Microsoft's SBS (Small Business Server) is the server of choice. The Clear Foundation wants to change that with their ClearOS 5.1 small business server distribution.

If a department or a branch office just needs one or two specific server jobs, there are plenty of obsolete PCs and easy-to-set-up, special-purpose Linux servers that can fill the bill for little or no cost. Dedicated Linux appliances, instead of giving you everything, give you just enough to fill a particular need.

There is some good news from Ecuador (in English) and also from Turkey...

"The elections have come shortly after FLISOL 2009 free software install fests were held throughout Ecuador, where the showing of free software’s philosophy of freedom, community and co-operation may have greatly swayed election results..."

Hungary's state Competition Authority raided the offices of Microsoft Corp.'s local subsidiary as part of a probe into the company's relationship with large software distributors. Microsoft used sales conditions and offered software distributors incentives - described as "loyalty discounts" - so they wouldn't offer clients anything but Microsoft Office products.

"It's been two years since Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa personally met with Richard Stallman [es], free software activist. Rafael Bonifaz reflects back on the meeting and what has happened since."