Government was once the great hope for open source but it will continue to diminish due to a lack of support according to the CIOs of Australia's largest government agencies.

Free and open source software continues to gain traction in the South African government with more than 90 percent of CIOs and IT managers in favour of using OSS in their departments.

Because it lacks the expensive licensing that is often the hallmark of proprietary software, open source is regularly touted as a way for IT departments to make their budget stretch a little bit further and it has already enjoyed considerable success in certain areas of the enterprise, such as web servers.

A visiting Red Hat executive has said that wariness on the part of a number of government CIOs over adopting open source is not a reflection of Australia's tech savvy, but the result of a "lack of understanding" of the software and its community.

Federal government agencies are adopting free and open source software (FOSS) with increasing zeal, according to a new study undertaken by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO).

In my last post, I discussed reasons why an open source government would be a good thing. Now I will tell you my plan for how an OSG would operate (using the USA in model). It is essential to understand that this is not a left vs right issue. The idea here is simply to empower the people of any given country, and allow those people to rule their own lives.

The Liberal Democrats have hit out at the government's failure to use more open source software, three years after it pledged to avoid 'lock-in' to proprietary systems. The government published a policy document, 'Open Source Software: use within UK government' in 2004, promising to consider open source alongside proprietary products in IT procurements...

On October 22, government and private industry experts will debate the issues and opportunities presented by collaborative software development models at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) Portland, Oregon.

Open source software in government was the topic on the Linux blogs this week, particularly President Obama's request that Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy prepare a paper on how the U.S. government can use open source technologies.