The Dutch police force will move to open source wherever that is possible, but not exclusively, a spokesperson said this week, correcting a statement published by Linux distributor Red Hat a week ago.

"...HAR (Hacking At Random) is an international technology and security conference, with a strong free software, freedom of information political leaning [...] The issues addressed by these talks are not just technical, they have political implications for how we live [...] But HAR2009 was not just about talks. It was also about meeting people, talking, exchanging ideas.

"In 2009, the EuroTeX and ConTeXt meetings will both be held together at the same time and place in the Netherlands, on August 31 through September 4, and the conference will focus on educational uses of TeX..." -- see also AUCTeX - Sophisticated document creation

The Netherlands Patent Office is the first government authority to implement the ‘Nederland Open in Connection' action plan and to switch a large number of its ICT systems to what is known as open source software.

the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

After more than 5000 complains of costumers about Vista in a month of time, the Dutch Consumers’ Counsel decided to talk with Microsoft. The goal of the negotiations was to give consumers the possibility to downgrade from Vista to XP if consumers had serious complaints about Vista.