LatIN Links…
Posted by: fredericknoronha on: September 9, 2008
This blog aims to build links between India and Latin America, specially in the field of software. We want to make the case that there’s a foundation we can build on — shared interest, considerable human resources, and even (believe it or not) some common cultural links! Read on…. the maintainer of the blog is an Indian journalist born in Brazil to South Asian parents of Goan orign!
Free Software in … Latin America
Posted by: fredericknoronha on: October 5, 2008
Ryan Bagueros http://news.northxsouth.com/ | ryan@northxsouth.com | 76.210.162.198 commented this on the blog:
Wow, your blog definitely has an interesting premise. We run a blog which contains as much news about the Latin American Free Software Movement as we can at http://news.northxsouth.com/ if you are interested in a link exchange .. just email me at the email I provided.
Certainly interesting, Ryan!
Tags: links, free software, latin america
Free software solutions… from the sun!
Posted by: fredericknoronha on: October 5, 2008
Júnior Mulinari is the current president of Solis. Used Bablefish to translate their home-page. Interesting… you can understand quite a bit in that way.
Some of the products they have listed include:
- Right on top, along with the logo of a set of colourful colour-pencils, they have a “set of Solis solutions meant for universities, including for academic management … that follows the life of the student from the time of admission through to tests and until graduation” (free translation).
A quote: “Solis reflects ability and innovation generated by human capital, in its services. This is its larger heritage.”
Contacts for Solis: SOLIS – Cooperativa de Soluções Livres, Av. Sete de Setembro, 184 – Sala 401, Bairro Moinhos – 95900-000 – Lajeado (RS), Fone: +55 51 3714-6653 comercial@solis.coop.br
Some background, courtesy Cesar Brod: Univates is the acronym for University of the Taquari River Valley Area. Today it is the brand name for the University Centre in the same Taquari River Valley. Solis means “the Sun”, in Latin, but is also an acronym for SOftware LIvre Soluções – Free Software Solutions. Solis works in a pretty strict co-op, associative sense.
Tags: brazil, educational software, free software, cooperatives
About Giovanni Maruzzelli, Asterisk, and celliax.org
Posted by: fredericknoronha on: October 5, 2008
Vickram Crishna recently announced on the India-GII mailing list about Giovanni Maruzzelli visit to India.
Vickram wrote:
Giovanni Maruzzelli will be spending some time around Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad between 8 and 30 October, 2008. A terrific opportunity for lucky people in those cities to meet him.
I suggested to him to meet up with the techie activists in Pondicherry if he is going that far south, but it would be useful to organise a LUG meeting in any or all of the three cities. Fred[erick] please copy this to the LUG lists you are part of, and ask them to propagate it further. I have copied Giovanni here, so please ask them to write him directly.
Earlier Alberto Escudero-Pascual explained the context:
Contacts for celliax.org:
Company : celliax
Website: www.celliax.org
Address : via Pierlombardo 9, 20135 Milano
Country/Territory : Italy
Business Email: gmaruzz at celliax dot org
Phone : 39-347-2665618
Fax : 39-02-87390039
About celliax.org:
If you are interested in helping, testing, debugging, etc, please subscribe to the mailing list at http://www.celliax.org/mailman/listinfo/celliax-dev
[This isn't exactly Latin America, but useful links for techies interested here, am sure!]
Tags: celliax.org, asterisk
Tania Pérez Bustos … Free Software, Colombia, India
Posted by: fredericknoronha on: September 22, 2008
Tania Pérez Bustos is a PhD student from Colombia doing fieldwork in India. Her research is on the educational and gender dimension of experiences like FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) that aim to popularize technology. She says, “I really liked the statement in the (BytesForAll) website in which you assume a critical position towards ICT and the political context it is immersed in … unfortunately not very common.” Here, she talks about her work, and her encounter with India, Colombia, and the need for links between these disparate and distant regions.
Tags: Colombia, software, FLOSS, researcher
Brazil, and Brod
Posted by: fredericknoronha on: September 21, 2008
It was some time back — nearly five years ago — that work was being done to put together a report on FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) in the “developing” countries. Cesar Brod was part of the team, and he focussed on Latin America. While searching for his section of the report (which I couldn’t locate where expected, but managed to find the complete report which includes the Latin American section), one came across this:
EOF – SOLIS, a Brazilian Free Software Cooperative: If a co-op business structure works for Sunkist and Land O’Lakes, it could work for software too. After several successful university software development projects, developers in Brazil are using an old business plan in a new way. Univates, a university center in the south of Brazil, has been a free software user since 1997 and has adopted free software as a standard for administrative people since 1999. As there was no academic administration system available as free software, Univates developed its own, SAGU. SAGU now is used by a dozen other universities in Brazil, with some of them contributing code. By adopting free software and developing SAGU, Univates has saved almost $200,000 US in software licenses. It further saves $70,000 US every year as it doesn’t need to buy new licenses or upgrades when installing new computers or increasing the user base. The number of students in Univates has grown from a little less than 2,000 in 1999 to more than 7,500 in 2003. The savings always have been more than enough to cover the payroll of the whole IT department, now employing 26 people.
That was some time back.
In November 2007, Cesar wrote in to say that he was “still surprised by the fact the Latin American portion of our Free as in Education study is still among the most viewed documents” on the website. Cesar has since left Solis and moved into his Brod Tecnologia. For Microsoft, Brod said, they’ve managed for them two open source development teams in two of the largest Brazilian Universities: UFRGS and Unicamp http://www.codeplex.com/ndos
He told me: We just stablished a partnership with iSolution, Daniel Heisler’s company. Daniel is one of Sagu’s top developers and we decided to partner to provide a complete, comprehensive Open Source solution for academic administration, going beyond what we started with Solis. Actually, our major goal is to start providing academic admin solutions (including library automation and web portals) to the international market. Our solutions are already ported to Spanish and we will soon start looking for potential partners to provide local suport and customization in other countries.
Some links:
- Univates-Free Software: http://www.univates.br/freesoftware.
- Univates’ IT department is a cooperative called SOLIS http://www.solis.coop.br, officially inaugurated on May 12, 2003
- Cesar Brod (cesar@brod.com.br)
Latin America Free Software Conference http://www.softwarelivre.pti.org.br
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