Doctor Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita (the South African State Information Technology Agency), announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference on Thursday.

On Sunday, August 5, 2007 Bush signed the revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) into law, in which the U.S. Congress spinelessly caved in and gave legal authority to the Bush administration to continue to intercept and spy on electronic communications. Then, on Thursday, August 16, 2007 the whole worldwide Skype network goes down. Coincidence?

After a very difficult and inconclusive meeting in ABNT (Brazilian Technical Standards Organization) office last tuesday, the standards process director had to analyze the audio recording of all the meeting, review some facts, review again all 63+2 comments produced by the technical group about the ECMA specification, and conclude that a NO for OOXML is the correct position for Brazil in ISO Fast

Theseus, the German government-funded program to develop new semantic Web technologies, will launch a competition in November to attract talented software programmers, including experts from the open-source community.

Norway opened a national center for competence in Free Software in Drammen, near Oslo, on Wednesday.

Officials seek help with preserving government e-mails to show how decisions are made.

AUGUSTA — To most of us, e-mail feels less important than a letter.

SINCE LAST week the coastal city of Rosario, Argentina's second largest city and home of about a million people is among the growing club of World cities with free municipal Wi-Fi access.