Red Hat's CEO, in a blog post on Monday, is endorsing the Obama Administration's call for openness and participation in government by likening the President's statement to the open source software movement.

President Obama came to office with the promise of change. His administration has pledged to create an environment of openness and participation. Some have already called him the “open source president” such as consultant and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos. There’s no better time than now. Transparency builds trust. Participation solves problems.

"With the elections to the Parliament nearing, the main political parties in the country have started announcing their manifestos. It is heartening to see that the CPI(M) and BJP have included references to Free Software (FS) in their manifestos. CPI(M) has generally been supportive of Free Software and has helped in the campaign against software patents.

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.

As we reported on March 22 when Jay Rockefeller was peddling nonsense about a pimple-faced kid in Latvia taking down the power grid in America with a laptop computer, the current wave of fear-mongering about cyber terrorism is just that — unsubstantiated fear-mongering.

It comes as both a surprise and not a surprise that the New South Wales (NSW) state government chose a "safe bet" of Lenovo and Microsoft to supply many thousands of taxpayer-funded laptops to secondary school students. Was Linux ever on the short list?

"Welcome to the Free Software Pact Initiative! Free Software advocacy associations April [...] and "Associazione per il software libero" (Italy) have launched a joint campaign aimed at the European Parliament elections in early June 2009. The campaign invites citizens to ask candidates to sign the "Free Software Pact".

I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova. Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA.