Userful Multiplier supports any Linux distribution, says the company that won a contract to deploy 356,800 virtualized "Userful Multiplier" desktops to Brazilian schools, but in this case, the schools will use the government-sponsored Debian based Linux Educacional 2.0 distribution developed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC).

The UK government has said it will accelerate the use of open source software in public services.

As the global economy continues its slide, U.S. politicians have staked out their positions at the stimulus trough, stopping only long enough to blame the other party for the world's problems. Now, more than ever, we need to focus on sound policy, not savvy politics. President Obama ran on the promise of bipartisanship but has come up against the stiff reality of a deep Republican-Democrat divide.

Russia is rapidly turning into open source's best-kept secret. I wrote about plans to roll out free software to all schools; more recently, there has been talk about creating a Russian operating system based on Fedora. And now there's this...

Unverifiable paperless voting systems are still considered normal in many states; The software that counts our votes is secret proprietary property of Diebold, Sequoia, et al; The system is unnecessarily difficult to use (or impossible to use) for citizens with disabilities; Election judges still strain to divine voter intent on a significant percentage of ballots

Iran has become the latest country to edge towards ditching Windows in favour of Linux, even if its refusal to abide by copyright laws means that the country does not pay a penny to Bill Gates.

Politicians have no incentive to adopt free and open source software - not until someone writes a FOSS application that will ensure that they win the next election. But when geeks are part of a party and the party's policies are furthered by adopting FOSS, then it is a slightly different story.