On Oct. 17, New Zealand honors those who make positive contributions to Open Source by presenting the first New Zealand Open Source Awards.

The event, to be held in Wellington, is being spearheaded by Catalyst IT, New Zealand's largest open source provider, and the New Zealand Open Source Society.

Wednesday night in Wellington is a lot more exciting when the New Zealand Open Source Award ceremony is on!

Open Source Society president Don Christie's blog, on Stuff, is reporting the State Services Commission has agreed to release the code for the new New Zealand government portal under the open source GPL licence.

“Information on the total use and value of open source in government is not held centrally and could not be obtained except at disproportionate cost.”

But open source software did “play an important role” in major government applications including the Directgov web portal, the online vehicle licensing system and Jobcentre Plus’s system to help people to find work, Merron added.

The Scottish Open Source Awards opens for nominations and entries on 1st August 2007 at 9AM. The awards are open to business, government, education, not-for-profit, charities and students, who contribute to or use Open Source Software or services.

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...

Following on from the success of the inaugural Open Source Content Management System Award, UK publisher Packt is pleased to announce details of its follow up. With new categories and an increase in prize money, the 2007 Open Source CMS Award will launch on July 16 and is expected to appeal to a broader range of projects.

The New Zealand Open Source Society is calling on Auditor-General to scrutinise government procurement of Microsoft software after the collapse of negotiations for a new three-year all-of-government software licensing deal.

This week Packt is announcing one new award winner a day. Already they've revealed that Drupal won Best Open Source PHP CMS