As always, the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) in Portland, Oreg. provided some fascinating discussion about how governments across the country and across the globe are using open source and how they want to use more of it

Governments continue to march toward open source. The Dutch government last year committed to use open standards, the French government has deployed Kubuntu desktops to over 1,000 members of parliament and staff, and a few days ago the United Kingdom government announced an Open Source action plan.

The newly elected German government plans to support open standards and open source software. In its four-year coalition contract, the government led by chancellor Angela Merkel, writes it wants to orient its IT systems on open standards and include open source solutions.

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

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.

Open Source in the public sector seemed to be all the rage in 2008, with government agencies all over Europe — not to mention agencies of the EU itself — adopting, and in many cases, mandating Open Source software and standards.

The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell.

The most surprising thing about George Osborne's recent Open Source announcements was the lack of backlash.

Open source vendors are calling on the UK government to put its money where its mouth is and police its own rules on public sector open source software procurement - which were revised in February this year.