North-by-South, the open source nearshore development firm I’ve been following, has just closed a funding round with Launch Capital.

In other NxS news, they interviewed Marcos Mazoni about FOSS’ continuing expansion in Brazilian government agencies, showing once again how Brazil is becoming an open source superpower.

Mazoni discusses the different method used to select an open source program from the analytical method used when purchasing a commercial, off-the-shelf program: “To choose the product I’m going to put in my network, I’m going to see which one more fits my needs and I’ll also find myself as an active element in the construction of the product, returning these changes to the community as well. So, we focus on more than just technological metrics, sometimes it isn’t about which product does more. This difference — of creating things together, sharing and non-competition is the big change that comes with the free software philosophy.”

Government agencies in Brazil have moved from developing many of their core technologies exclusively in-house, to cooperating across disparate groups of government, private sector, and individual collaborators. This lets their projects progress faster and introduce innovative new features that otherwise might never have been invented.

“We also started to introduce the thought that cooperation is the best thing in the free software world. It’s not the matter of the technology itself, but the co-operation, working together beyond the boundaries of my organization, and that I don’t need to have the brand of my organization on every product. I have to have a good product that works, that has a permanent life cycle. This is the logic that free software shows us as a great organizational innovation.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under Free Culture, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.