I recently attended GeoBrasil 2006 in Sao Paulo, where there is and has been for some time a very active open source geospatial community. For example, the 2nd Brazilian MapServer meeting was held last November in Itajai. A lot of this can be ascribed to the active encouragement from the Universidad do Vale do Itajai (UNIVALI) in Itajai. For many years Brazil has had “open source” projects that, like GRASS, predate open source. For example, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) hosts TerraLib (TerraLib ) and TerraView (TerraView ).
An interesting web site where you can find a Brazilian Portuguese Linux distro specifically for geospatially aware applications is (Geolivre ) or (UMN Geolivre ). One of the administrators in Helton Uchoa, whom I met at GeoBrazil and who delivered a presentation on the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (osgeo.org).
I participated on an interesting panel with Mitch Garnett from ESRI and Rubens Camargo from SISGRAPH (an Intergraph partner). I saw broad agreement among us that sharing data is good, that Google Earth is making geospatial technology accessible to many more people – though Mitch made the point that it may not be raising the awareness of GIS, that geospatial is becoming ubiquitous – though often hidden, that geospatial web services are increasingly important, and that the pace with which geospatial is being integrated with enterprise systems is increasing. I think it was also indicative that every speaker mentioned open source geospatial, which to me shows that this is a phenomenon that can not be ignored, certainly not in Brazil.
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