Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the OLPC program can reverse the rural exodus to Lima's shantytowns four hours away. It's the best answer yet to "a global crisis of education" in which curricula have no relevance, he said. "If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes."

As other countries embrace free, open source software (like Austrian schools learning how to use OpenOffice), especially GNU/Linux distributions on the desktop as alternatives to Windows/Mac, the burning question is, how long before the USA catches on? That said, consider how 10th and 11th grade Vietnamese and foreign students are learning...

US Nature magazine, which mainly targets scientists but also reaches a wider audience due to its easily understandable reporting, will release articles dealing with genome research under a type of Creative Commons license.

The Linux computer operating system, which so far has had little success in use for cellphones, is set to become more widely available in handsets next year, helped by Google's mobile push, said Linux's creator Linus Torvalds.

The New York Stock Exchange is investing heavily in x86-based Linux systems and blade servers as it builds out the NYSE Hybrid Market trading system that it launched last year. Flexibility and lower cost are among the goals. But one of the things that NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow says he most wants from the new computing architecture is technology independence.

The "brains" of the Ares I rocket that will send four astronauts back to the moon sometime in the next 12 years will be built by Boeing, NASA announced today—but the specifications will be open-source and non-proprietary, so that other companies can bid on future contracts.

In the last eight months, the islands of Andaman and Nicobar have witnessed tremendous development in the IT sector, especially in the case of open source and Linux®. Those I call the “IT people of Andaman” have been reluctant to implement and explore the benefits of open source software in the past. Some still are.