Only three days after posting my blog regarding the plight of Google's Chinese customers and how their data is now at the whims of a US-based company and its conflict with the Chinese government, I read about the issues of SourceForge.net and the U.S. State Department's Export lists and how the data stored in a US-based company, sometimes created by non-U.S.

News about banks, Microsoft, Paul Allen's voyages, and Microsoft's funding of the US president

HERE is what Craig Mundie, whom Obama has just appointed, thinks about Free/open source software...

Open source software in government was the topic on the Linux blogs this week, particularly President Obama's request that Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy prepare a paper on how the U.S. government can use open source technologies.

"You can tune in to Ogg Vorbis coverage of the US presidential
inauguration on WBUR at http://www.wbur.org/listen/feed/ogg.m3u..." (WBUR's Ogg Vorbis stream)

Much noise has been made in the past week or so about President-elect Barack Obama's creation of a governmental chief tech officer position. My question is: What will be their stance on open source? Will they lean towards it, mandate it, forbid it ... or ignore it entirely? I looked into it, and came away feeling we had much bigger problems looming.

Obama receives money directly from Microsoft executives but not from their lobbyists

"Change.org (not the same as Change.gov) provides a feature where site members can suggest ideas they’d like to see adopted by the United States Government. One suggestion currently getting attention on the site is to Support the Free Software Movement..."