“Calls on the Commission and the Member States to recognise that the Internet is a vast platform for cultural expression, access to knowledge, and democratic participation in European creativity, bringing generations together through the information society; calls on the Commission and the Member States, therefore, to avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and

The European Union is contributing 10 million euro (around £8 million) in sponsorship to a project called PrimeLife, which aims to develop open source tools for personal privacy management and protection, and get the community at large to adopt them.

The Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) has announced that the agency will be migrating to OpenOffice.org office suite as well as adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF). In addition, Microsoft Office is to be phased out by end of 2008.

Becta has recently shown that it is unafraid of speaking out on behalf of schools. Unhappy with the value for money schools were getting regarding software licencing they first referred Microsoft to the government’s Office of Fair Trading then sent shock waves through schools when it issued its advice not to upgrade to Windows Vista or Office 2007.

T@SCHOOL project offers exclusively free software based support for primary education in kerala.This time,Director of Public instruction has decided to conduct SSLC(secondary school leaving certificate-the basic requirement for higher studies in INDIA) IT practical examination for this year from 27th February to 7th March 2008. It is first time , conducting IT practical examination for complete students in the free software – IT@School GNU/Linux. IT@School project and Pareekshabhavan has entrusted to conduct the examination for more than 4.7 lakh students throughout the schools of Kerala, Lakshadeep and Gulf countries. IT@school admins are preparing to apply for guiness as they have the largest number of student attending an exam based on exclusive free software based softwares:)

StarOffice is Sun Microsystems' proprietary suite of office applications, which is based on the Open Source OpenOffice. In 2006 Bristol took the further step of adopting the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF).

In a document published last week, the EC states among others that the Commission will prefer Open Source software for its new IT projects: "For all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission Infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform."