The British government and armed forces are to continue their widespread use of the version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser that was attacked by Chinese hackers who broke into Google's corporate network – even though both the French and German governments have advised people to stop using it.

What happens when the political becomes personal? Then who has the power?

When a Public Administration uses it to reform the way it works, to solve the problem it actually has instead of those authors of proprietary software _think_ it has

If you know software programming well enough to write a new word processor with a secret file format, do it now, put it on sale and price it one million Euro per seat. Should that law be approved, you'll just have to send
Christmas greetings to all Italian Public Administrations to force them to buy your software.

The European Union's Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR.eu) as of today is offering public administrations access to more than two thousand free and open source applications.

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary.

The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn. Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didn’t go far enough.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.