Near-shoring open-source development to Latin America with North-by-South
Tristan Rhodes from the Ubuntu community sent me a link to a cool company called North-by-South. North-by-South is essentially an open-source software off-shoring firm with a twist: Instead of outsourcing to India or Eastern Europe (with the time zone problems that can arise), North-by-South instead works with talented open-source engineers in Latin America:
- NXS gives businesses access to the top talent of Latin American open source programmers. Our network has all the skill sets needed to launch a software project into production from start to finish, located only 1-4 hours ahead of Pacific Standard time.
- Given the differences in cost-of-living in Latin America, we can provide top development services at extremely competitive pricing.
As the rates for Indian and Eastern European developers continues to climb, it may be wise to look south to Latin America. There are some exceptional open-source developers in or from Mexico and Latin America (Miguel de Icaza being the most famous of them), and Latin American governments' adoption of open-source software is only going to increase this.
North-by-South just raised an angel round of funding, and has a strong management team. The team includes as former Director of Engineering of Jumpstart Technologies, which launched Tagged.com (estimated in 2007 by Techcrunch to be one of the fastest-growing social network on the web) and incubated Hi5.com.
Perhaps most importantly, this is a team that groks the spirit and code of open source. I may just be optimistic on North-by-South because of my family's affection for Latin America, but whatever the reason, I'd encourage you to take a look.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
- by db_girl May 7, 2008 4:45 PM PDT
- Hello -- I've been following from afar the progression of North-by-South ever since I heard about it a month or so ago when I was researching for myself the Latin American free software movement. I think this is an incredibly important company in that it is designed to provide concrete, financial support to the Latin American free software movement. I believe that for open source advocates, what is happening in Latin America should be the one of the top items we refer to in our "talking points" for why open source is a viable, superior alternative to proprietary solutions. Latin America's case exemplifies all the most important parts of the question "why open source?" cost efficiency, improved security, sovereignty (for governments outside the US). For developing countries were poverty and even starvation, in some cases, is a significant problem, paying millions and millions in just licensing fees to install some software that you don't know WHAT it's doing running mission-critical, public service systems would just be insane. Switching to open source is the only sensible thing to do. And, that's why open source is becoming an option for South Africa, all of Latin America, countries in southeast Asia and etc. So, -thank you- to North-by-South for seeing this opportunity out of your international collaboration experience. We should make sure they have enough work to keep themselves working all the time! I manage a couple web development projects for clients in the US and I'm going to recommend that they use North-by-South, so I can help contribute to this financial support of free software developers in Latin America!
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