Several governments and councils reported multi-year migration plans to GNU/Linux. Free software activists praised each one of them in their blogs and commentaries. However, a few months or years on, some of those plans crumbled. Vienna is one of them. A question here begs to be answered: why did it happen?

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, has just published the 2008 Content Management Systems Satisfaction Survey. It appears that non-profit organizations prefer open source solutions than proprietary one. These solutions maximize their resources allocation and give them the best of contemporary technologies.

The New York Times reports today a hard rebuke from European Union’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, against Microsoft’s tactics in Europe. In her speech she offered up some advice worth heeding; “I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels.

Slow adoption of open source and free software in UK schools can be attributed to the same kind of inertia that afflicts SMEs in the UK.

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament. The Czech Republic team was just three minutes away from qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 on Sunday before Turkey managed to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 win.

The Utah Department of Health has enlisted the Collaborative Software Initiative to develop a system for meeting CDC requirements for infectious disease tracking and reporting. The system is being built using the community sourcing model, a model that mixes both open source and commercial interest elements.