"...A broad movement of campaigners and organizations is calling on everybody to join action against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses. On 11 October 2008, concerned people in many countries will take to the streets, the motto being 'Freedom not fear 2008'. Peaceful and creative action, from protest marches to parties, will take place in many capital cities..."

In short: there's an incredible free software movement happening in Latin America. To support this movement, North-by-South is a San Francisco-based business whose goal is to give businesses in Silicon Valley access to this pool of talent and to materially support the open source developers in Latin America.

This blog entry on Matt Asay's Open Road blog at C-Net talks about the emerging advantages to off-shoring development to Latin America, because of the incredible free software movement happening there and the benefits over far-away development to "code factories" in India or Eastern Europe.

Representatives from developing countries (primarily of South America) reject OOXML and ISO's decision.

To mark the upcoming October 19th meeting of DFEY-NW (Digital Freedom in Education and Youth - North West) I have written a short essay about what I think DFEY exists for and why it came into being.
Let us know what you think!

The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. The DFD was initiated and is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Bitter political foes South and North Korea are to jointly develop a version of Linux.

Forget now about labels and conventions: there is not such thing as free software, like there is not such thing as free speech. There are free developers and free speakers, and they are the ones setting the limits of freedom of their products and actions. If they are not free, how free can be the result of their actions?

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.