the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.

On the occassion of Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2008, one of the three winners of the SFD 2007 Best Event competition, the FOSS Nepal community has issued "Kathmandu Declaration", that was signed by over 700 professionals, students and other FOSS enthusiasts, amidst the presence of Nepal's Minister of Science and Technology, journalists and government officials.

David Cameron has declared that a Conservative government would favour a greater use of open-source software.

One of the aspects of migrating to Linux that puts many people off giving it a try is the idea of having to leave behind tried and trusted Windows applications and having to make the switch to something else.

I saw this article yesterday titled, "Study: Federal Gov't. Can Save Billions in IT Spending," and feel compelled to comment. The gist of the article is that by switching to open source software, like Linux and OpenOffice.org, the federal government would save billions of dollars in IT costs.

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...

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.

Obviously, there is money to be saved by using open source software in schools. Even merely substituting OpenOffice of Microsoft Office on student computers can save thousands in licensing costs