"On April 17, Marcos Mazoni, the current director of Brazil’s Federal Data Processing firm (SERPRO) was appointed to head an arcane bureaucratic body: the Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software (CISL). Mazoni replaces Renato Martini, the current president of Brazil’s National Technology Institute (ITI, a small office within the executive branch).

The Brazilian free software movement is in such high gear that it is almost impossible to keep up on all the new developments and projects that are happening throughout the country. Brazil is larger in size than the continental United States and has a population of almost 200 million people.

"A proposed new law that restricts the freedom internet use in Brazil has already passed the Senate and is dangerously close to going on the books [...] The Free Software movement from Brazil is striking up against this project and they have a petition online against it.

The Collaborative Network for Free and Open Software Latin American and Carib (RCSLA) is a network created at the end of 2005 by the United Nations Development Program and UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil) to increase sharing of practical knowledge and experience in deploying free software governance plans in Latin America.

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.

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.

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.

"It's hard not to be enthusiastic about fisl, or to expand the acronym, the 9th Fórum International Software Livre, held each year in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Brazil has launched a new version of their e-government portal, using Plone and the Zope Application Server. NXS has translated the press release announcing the new website.