Comments on: Near-shoring open-source development to Latin America with North-by-South

Working with India in increasingly expensive and has always been a bit inconvenient. North-by-South offers a way to do open-source software development with a talented team of developers within or close to US time zones.

[royrubin]

I've always wondered why a strong tech community didn't develop in Mexico as it seems to be a natural geographical fit. Especially now with the demand for engineers so strong and the difficult visa situation in the US, such services will be in great demand.

[matt-perez]

Unfortunately, Latin America doesn't come to mind when it comes to technology, even though there's great talent South of the Border. Nearsoft is a software development companies with operations in Mexico (Hermosillo, Sonora). Once we get in front of prospects, the concept sells itself. The challenge has been making people aware of the fact that there's a strong technical community in Mexico and they don't need to go to the other side of the world to find help (http://www.nearsoft.com).

[db_girl]

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!