The council of the Italian region of Puglia is about to approve the law proposed last December that will make the use of open source and open standards mandatory for the region's public administrations, according to news reports.

About a week before attending the Open Source Business Conference last month, I heard an interview on public radio with the founder of Good News Network, a web site dedicated to reporting nothing but — you guessed it — good news.

Source Forge has banned downloads from Syria, Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea. Funny enough, the decision came after US Secretary of State speech on Internet's freedom.
In Syria, the Open Source community is upset and felt that the decision is against principles of software freedom.

Software is only as good as the people that work on it. All of the great open source projects had great project teams. If you want to be the next big thing in open source a good team is essential. Here's the low down on getting a gang together as well as the non-coding roles you'll want.

SpringSource announced news earlier today that it has acquired Hyperic. This is good news for SpringSource, but not everyone out there believes that it's good news for open source.

The Italian region Puglia will make the use of open source software and open standards mandatory for its public administrations. A law, adopted on 2 December by the regional administration, instructs regional and local public administrations to use open formats for the electronic disseminations of documents, and wherever possible use free and open source software.

Organizations in Asia are not as ready to go open source for key business applications, experts in the region say. Over in the United Kingdom and United States, it is a different story with inclination growing, a survey has shown. An Accenture study of 300 large public- and private-sector organizations in Ireland, the U.K. and U.S.

2009 was very good for open-source businesses. Sure, there was the very public news of Red Hat's gravity-defying year, along with Novell's SUSE Linux business climbing each quarter, but what of the still-private open-source companies?

While it is good news that significant amounts are being invested in open source vendors, there has been a decrease in the amount of funds invested in Series A rounds, suggesting that “the VC industry has filled the checkerboard and has moved to something else as far as startups are concerned”