Stronger policy in Hungary to facilitate adoption of Free software; mere promises in the UK seen as insufficient

Hungary's state Competition Authority raided the offices of Microsoft Corp.'s local subsidiary as part of a probe into the company's relationship with large software distributors. Microsoft used sales conditions and offered software distributors incentives - described as "loyalty discounts" - so they wouldn't offer clients anything but Microsoft Office products.

Hungary decided to re-vote due to irregularities. Here is the rest of the story, notes by Tomka Gergely, who attended the second meeting as a technical expert.

Jobbik is not a new Linux distribution, but a political party, hell bent on making Hungary an open source powerhouse, if wins the upcoming general election, in April. This is an awesome news.

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary.

A history lesson and a reminder of Novell's position that it's a "mixed-source" company.

Novell supports the BSA et al, thus harming some of its own interests as an arguably "open source" (or "mixed source") company

Here's an explanation of what was going on in Hungary and why Ballmer had eggs thrown at him: "A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS.

Hungary's public administrations will by default use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April this year, the government ministers agreed on 23 December, and all public organisations are encouraged to move to open source office tools. Hungary's government also in December decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools.