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