As one of the foremost free and open source gatherings, the Desktop Summit was in the right setting in the City of Berlin. At the Summit, the City announced the winners of its open source competition “Berlin – Made to Create”, a program promoting Open Source and open standards ideas and solutions. At the same session, the GNOME and KDE communities also announced their outstanding contributors.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.

A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city's IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

Slowly but surely, open source software is making its way to countries that have previously seen very little FOSS adoption, and the good news is that for many of these countries, it's the best technology choice to make.

When the city of Madera, Calif., needed a new voice system, it turned to open source technology -- not just for the IP telephony but for an entire network-infrastructure overhaul and loads of other functions. All the renovations cost less than half the estimated price of deploying a commercial VoIP system alone.

Open Source City offers a programme of workshops, masterclasses, talks and concerts that shed light on the growing impact of Free Software on the creative practices of today, in particular in media art and music. The event programme and workshop booking form are available now.

The successful deployment of free and open source software (FOSS) in projects in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Latin America are described in a publication entitled "Breaking Barriers" by UNDP's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Eclipse Foundation are hosting a summit to reflect the fast growth of the open source movement in Asia. OSSummit Asia will be held Nov. 26-30 at Le Meridian hotel in Hong Kong's Cyberport IT zone.

Meeting Will Bring Together Prominent Lawyers of the Free and Open Source Software Community and Provide Free Legal Education to the Public