Three local government shires in Western Australia have adopted the open source Xen virtualization technology to virtualize Windows servers on Linux hosts and reduce its need for physical machines.

Australia's $21 billion ICT trade deficit could be dramatically reduced if the local industry played to its strengths and exported services using open source software, according to industry analyst Jeff Waugh.

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s decision last month to sell desktop PCs with Linux installed on them in Australia is giving hope to Linux advocates at the Encompass HP user group that a similar system may be on its way in the U.S.

Standards Australia has cast a vote to abstain from the ISO/IEC JTC1 ballot to adopt the DIS 29500 Office Open XML format draft standard as an International Standard. The decision to cast an abstain vote from the current ballot follows months of consultation and a clear lack of consensus in Australia on this issue by stakeholders.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia.

I have the information for those of you *who live in Australia* and who wish to send comments to Standards Australia. You can find a link to the template you need to use here. Or just download it. You fill it in and send it to Michael Langdon, Project Manager, Commerce at Standards Australia, michael.langdon at standards.org.au by the deadline, which is Tuesday

Linux vendor Red Hat's first Linux desktop product aimed at small businesses will be available to system builders in Australia at the beginning of 2008, according to a senior executive at the company.

"It was a partial harmonisation with only those parts of American law that favoured certain interests," he said. "The reality is that American law doesn't change; Australian law changes, but specifically it excludes the consumer-friendly parts of American copyright law, namely the doctrine of fair use."