The discussions around SOPA have shown a very unfortunate side of United States policymaking — that its policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy.

Ubuntu within the United States is alive and well! The US Teams Project, launched the beginning of 2007 has been a HUGE success.

On January 30th, 2012, I started a petition requesting that the U.S. government broaden their use of Free Software and Open Source software to save money. I deeply believe that this one step is PART of the solution to the problem of the crushing national debt that the United States is currently facing. Software expenditures are a very small part of our national budget.

Here in Europe we do not care about software patents, at least not yet. As Canonical is based in the EU this should not give the Ubuntu community any issue by itself. So keep any patent related problem for United-States based distributions and leave Ubuntu alone. Or move to a country that enforces your freedom all-day-every-day!

The United States thanks the International Bureau for preparing the background paper on Standards and Patents, and we support the statement made by Germany on behalf of Group B.

"Through tactics that successfully derailed antitrust processes in other parts of the world, including the United States, Microsoft has managed to postpone this day for almost a decade. But thanks to the perseverance and excellent work of the European Commission, these tactics have now failed in Europe,"

Nearly a decade after the government began its landmark effort to break up Microsoft, the Bush administration has sharply changed course by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct, including the recent rejection of a complaint by Google.

The Brazilian free software movement is in such high gear that it is almost impossible to keep up on all the new developments and projects that are happening throughout the country. Brazil is larger in size than the continental United States and has a population of almost 200 million people.

Massachusetts recently passed a sweeping new data security law that will have a profound impact on the way the United States, and perhaps the rest of the world, manages and develops data-centric applications. Oddly, most people in the business don't seem to know about it.