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.

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.

"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 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.

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.

"PGCon Brazil is the bigest PostgreSQL event in Latin America ..." —— PostgreSQL is free software licensed under the Modified BSD license. ——

"...It is a failure of the GNU project and of the free software movement that there is so much emphasis on monolithic distributions and binary package distributions. It is a failure of the GNU project and the free software movement that one so often encounters distros that offer to not install source trees and even offer to not install development environments.

A new platform designed to help software developers find money and resources for their projects has been launched in Brazil. The makeITopen site is Brazil’s first and only crowdfunding platform aimed at helping those involved in the development of free software.

"...copyleft is a tool designed to spread freedom in software, at any cost. The FSF, which wrote the GNU and Affero licenses, has the goal to make all software free as in freedom. Companies are ‘free’ to join the revolution, or to look somewhere else for their needs.