Lately, Brazil has been getting a lot of attention (host to the next World Cup in 2014 and site of the first Olympics to be held in South America in 2016), but it also has gotten attention for its embrace of open source technologies. It was my pleasure to speak at an event organized for business executives by our partner in Brazil, Primeware. The topic?—Open source enterprise search software, of course.

I talk about my experience in Brazil further in my “Logical Expression” post this week.  It was great to learn that all the participants at the event had growth and expansion plans, and open source is being widely used and embraced, from Lucene/Solr to Linux and beyond. From conversations with the executives in attendance, I learned that their main motivations for using open source were quality, easy access, a short learning curve, and lower cost. I was left with a very positive impression and reminded yet again about the power of the open source community — in a country with a growing economy and a growing appetite for technology.