France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in

Second in the Linux server business to leader Red Hat, Novell is continuing to strive for major server wins. In its latest significant victory, Novell announced that Office Depot has elected to consolidate its server infrastructure on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1.

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

The French Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries chooses Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 for its servers.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries chose to migrate its local servers (about 400 machines) from Windows NT Server to Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0, within two years.

According to a Nabble post from an OpenStreetMap (OSM) community member the French Minister of the Economy, and the Direction Générale des Finances publiques (DGFiP) in charge of the French cadastre have allowed the OSM project access to vectorised geo-data from the French land registry.

In a press release from the Icelandic Ministry of Education the ministry explains it is working with the free software community to put free software into Icelandic schools. Two main reasons are given. Firstly, the Ministry’s agenda is to increase knowledge and competence among students in IT related subjects (using free software). Secondly, the ministry wants to cut costs.

"MONTREAL, Aug. 27 /CNW Telbec/ - FACIL, a non-profit association, which promotes the collective appropriation of Free Software, contests the Quebec government purchasing methods for software used within public administrations.

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source.