This year's Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) to be held Oct. 15-16 in Portland, Ore., will close with panelists from Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the OpenDocument Foundation weighing in on Open Document Formats.

Mandriva today announced that the Federal Service on Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) in Russia has agreed to authorise the certification of the Mandriva Linux OS for all safe and legal use in organizations dealing with confidential information. The certification process will be finished in 3 to 6 months.

Cutting-edge technology -- much of it operated by amateurs -- has played a remarkably powerful role in documenting the bloodshed in Myanmar and helping to spark a global outcry. Video clips of the country's biggest political protests in nearly two decades, surreptitiously filmed and filed via the Internet, have made their way onto sites like YouTube.

In May 2005, the head of the Office for Computerizing Cuban Society, Roberto del Puerto, announced that the government was preparing for its central administration offices to switch to the free GNU/Linux system, which uses the Linux kernel written by Linus Torvalds of Finland in 1991. A national group was formed for this purpose.

Free and open source software (FOSS) is well-known for promoting new development methods. Now, a European nonprofit organization known as FOSS Bridge hopes that FOSS can be equally innovative in promoting cooperation between companies and in fostering investment in developing nations.

The One Laptop per Child's XO, better known as the $100 laptop, gets most of the headlines but NComputing is showing in Macedonia, with its Ubuntu Linux based servers and virtual PC terminals, that there's more than one way to get inexpensive Linux desktops into students' hands.

Russian OS is to be installed on every school computer in Russia by 2009. Furthermore, every pupil will get the opportunity to operate the applied software produced in Russia, Leonid Reiman, acting Minister of Communication stated at a press conference. Experts and market participants consider the terms within which software is to be developed quite reasonable. According to Mr.