The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced that its affiliate, LPI-Middle East, had signed an agreement with Ma3bar initiative to promote the adoption of Free and Open Source software throughout the Arab world.

Non-profit corporation Creative Commons (CC) is making inroads in the Middle East by launching their first Arabic copyright licences in Jordan next month.

The public sector is ignoring government guidelines on procuring open-source software, according to open source database company Ingres. At a roundtable event on Thursday, Ingres worldwide operations chief Steve Shine praised the guidelines--issued in February--but said they were being ignored because there is nobody in place to enforce them.

Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today the availability of Ingres Database 10, the latest version of the company's flagship open source database product.

Jordanian Minister of Education, Ibrahim Badran, announced Jordan's intention to start BLOSSOMS II in ten selected high schools of the kingdom. BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies) is an Open-education initiative started by MIT in partnership with Jordan and Pakistan.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Jordan’s Security Depositary Center (SDC), a non-profit public utility institution that oversees the registration and deposit of securities, has implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the foundation to its open source strategy.

Recently Glyn Moody and Richard Steel, who is both the president of SocITM (the Society of local government IT Managers) and CIO of the London Borough of Newham, had a minor spat across their respective blogs at ComputerWorld, provoked by Steel's response to to the UK government's newly announced policy for the adoption and promotion of open source - Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Gover

It's not just European government that's opting for open source. Today the NSA (the super-secret spy agency in the US) have announced they are joining in with OpenSolaris. Barton has an interview that explores this more. I think we'll see more and more government engagement as the adoption-led market takes hold.

Using Free software from open source communities makes perfect sense for governments, and not just for the obvious reasons of up-front savings on license fees.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Ingres will offer a combination of Linux, JBoss middleware and the Ingres open source database as a new open source software stack to application developers around the world, the companies recently announced.