The US Veterans Affairs Department has launched a contest with $3 million in prizes for development of a new patient scheduling system based on open source software. The VA’s chief information officer said “for the last 18 months, we have been working with the open source community to support this change in direction.”

Again, as long-suffering readers may recall, the original European Interoperability Framework also required royalty-free licensing, but what was doubtless a pretty intense wave of lobbying in Brussels overturned that, and EIF v2 ended up pushing FRAND, which effectively locks out open source - the whole point of the exercise.

A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city's IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

According to a press release issued today by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve the OpenDocument Format as the single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement.

Most geeks that I have met tend to not hold a great deal of interest in politics. We generally would prefer to spend our time solving technical problems than debating presidential politics. However, if we compare the two men fighting to be the commander-in-chief of the United States for the next four years, one has a clear advantage from a Free Software perspective.

The council of the government of the autonomous province of Trentino on Wednesday morning approved a law on free and open source software and open data. The law instructs public administrations to prepare migrations plans to switch to free and open source software and to make its software applications available as open source.

In his first interview since declaring his intention to stand for the Senate at the next election, Mr Assange said he planned to be a defender of liberty and ''the right of citizens … to live lives free from state interference''.

[Even if there were no prize, this would be a great advocacy opportunity for the FLOSS community to change the world. And we work with (or are) NPO's, too.]

As part of its revamp, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is asking yoof and geeks to submit world-changing ideas, 60 of which will earn their entrants a trip to Geneva to pitch them to "industry leaders".