News stories about Linux and Open Source in government and legislation about Open Source.

 Following Bill Gates' Linux Attack Money, Dec 30, 2005

Recently, we witnessed the power of Microsoft's political machine when one of the champions of free and open source software, Peter Quinn resigned as CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In my opinion, Microsoft just blinked and everything went south.

In what is believed to be the largest open source project ever developed in Australia, Victoria's Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) has spent the past two years and A$1.2 million on a new content portal which will go live early next year.

Novell Inc. Tuesday announced an agreement with the government of Switzerland to convert 3,000 of its servers to the company's SUSE Linux operating system.

The attack was front page "news" in the Boston Globe. The exoneration of Peter Quinn, whose only "sin" was wanting to use OpenDocument Format instead of Microsoft's solution, is now complete. The bogus investigation is over, and they couldn't find any dirt.

Two public financial institutions will start the first Linux-based Internet banking services this month as the government tries to end Microsoft Windows' long-running monopoly in online banking systems.

To attract users' interest in open source, the Mannheim IT department is providing every city employee with copies of OpenOffice.org and Linux for their home PC and will provide free support for home users. It is also arranging meetings with users where they can discuss their concerns about the migration.

The German city's Linux migration is going to take a while, but those responsible are confident in its success

Lockheed Martin is planning to use a distribution of Linux for its United States Army Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program.

References to free software and Linux were removed from a UN document after Microsoft claimed that such software aims to 'make it impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product'

The city of Vienna's move to open source is going well but will never embrace every desktop machine.

The city of Paris is accelerating its move to free and open-source software as part of a strategy to reduce its dependence on suppliers. It plans to replace more of its server software with free and open-source alternatives, and to install open-source applications on desktops, city officials said last week.

Tanzania, like the rest of Africa, is attempting to bridge the digital divide to create an information economy. And like many other African states, it is turning to open source to achieve this goal.

The Indian government has struck a deal with a number of PC vendors to pre-install open-source software on computers sold in the country.

Birmingham City Council is converting the PCs used in its 40 libraries to Linux as part of a year-long trial of the open source operating system.

China has chosen Linux as the future of its software industry. But Novell's SUSE became the number one distribution in China's Linux market this year, and more menaces to native developers, such as the march of the Red Hat, are looming. A good portion of the problem comes from the way domestic Linux companies do business in China.

So Munich is receiving all the press about their careful and detailed migration to Linux on the desktop and here comes one of the poorest region in Europe showing that this can be simply done during a weekend.

Open Source in Government: Some governments have embraced the potential of open source, while others seem culturally opposed to the whole concept

From the point of view of a software vendor, adopting Microsoft's XML schema would mean that Microsoft, and not the state, would determine under what terms vendors can offer goods and services or even engage in business with the state. This would be something like Ford saying to Massachusetts that it can also purchase Hondas, or cars from other companies, but only under terms and conditions that are set by and from companies that are approved by Ford.

Debate among Massachusetts government officials may throw a wrench in a state proposal to migrate away from Microsoft's Office productivity suite in favor of software that supports an open-document format.

The migration of around 300 business applications from Windows to Linux is one of the biggest challenges facing the city of Munich, which has embarked on one of Europe's largest open-source projects in the public sector.

New Zealand’s Inland Revenue may move 7,000 desktops from Microsoft to open source

Alejandro Toledo, president of Peru, signed legislation this week that allows public institutions to consider adopting open-source software, another step forward for the open-software movement. The legislation, which Peru's Congress approved in September, allows government agencies and schools to choose between proprietary software from companies like Microsoft or Oracle, as well as open-source alternatives.

The Chinese Government should stick to its policy of strongly supporting open-source software to build a robust domestic industry, an industry veteran has said. "Open-source software provides a big opportunity for China to develop its fledgling software industry," said Lu Shouqun, president of the China Open Source Software Promotion Union.

[Estonia] gave the Linux-based voting system a trial run in January, when about 600 people voted online in a referendum in the capital, Tallinn. The plan is to allow online voting in the next parliamentary elections in 2007.

The German city is on target to complete the first stage of a major migration to Linux this year

If the big names in Linux and open source are the shakers, then the movers are the unknown people in the trenches -- the IT shops. It's IT managers who convinced their companies to use Linux, made it work and now put open source software in the corporate IT fast lane.

James Prendergast's column, Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument, touched a nerve among FOXnews.com's tech savvy readers and ignited a heated response.

It is in this city that a "gentle migration" approach is being tried -- in the course of which the basic infrastructure services such as the city administration's 110 servers are migrated first and it is only at the very end that the 3,700 PCs of the employees with their 150 different specialist software applications are switched to the new system.

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft’s decision to make the enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance programme. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft’s licensing regime.

Cuestas saw in the marketplace what he considered a convergence of Dell, Red Hat, and Oracle, so he made what he calls the "logical decision" and unified the shop onto Red Hat.

A protracted NSW government project to give its agencies cheaper and quicker access to Linux and open source software is reaching fruition with several vendors preparing to sign contracts as pre-approved suppliers.

Japan aims to switch some government computers to the free Linux operating system and reduce its dependence on Microsoft Windows.

The move to Linux is saving the City of Cape Town R200 000 on hardware maintenance alone and has improved scalability and performance, as the city drops IBM AIX in favour of Novell Suse Linux on HP servers for its Oracle back-end databases

Massachusetts has decided not to be locked in to any vendor in particular, although it isn't anti-Microsoft, because it has this idea in its head that citizens have the right to access their own documents without having to pay anyone and without restrictions as to what operating system they have to use or technical blockages to access not only now but way into the future.

In the end, the Massachusetts plan represents poor public policy and terrible technology policy.

An agency of the French Ministry of Defence is planning to install a high-performance Linux cluster for technical and scientific work.

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft's decision to make an enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance program. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft's licensing regime.

David Berlind over at ZDNet wrote a remarkable article called Did Microsoft send the wrong guy to Massachusetts' ODF hearing?. If you missed this article, you'll have missed the equivalent of what Intel's Andy Grove called an inflection point. This one has the potential to have more impact than the release of the first Pentium processor.

Peru has passed its law encouraging procurement of Free Software by the government. Please note that the law is about Free Software, not Open Source, as opposed to proprietary software, distinguished by license.

Asked whether his previous job and intimate relationships with many executives of Microsoft Korea drew back the decision of tilting toward open-source programs, he flatly denied the guess.

The switch to the OpenDocument format will make state documents less accessible to the public because no one has the software to read the format.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today criticized a plan in Massachusetts to force all state computer networks to move to an open source format.

Senior government officials from 13 countries were among a group of open-source advocates behind a report presented to the World Bank last Friday calling on nations to accelerate economic growth by using products based on what are called open-technology standards.

Recent stories about open source technology in government raises the question of whether CIOs of municipalities are serious about moving to Linux and open source technology, or if they are just using the threat of such a switch as a way to either get Microsoft to lower pricing on its software, or to force the dominant desktop software vendor to add new features?

When we talk about the Microsoft monopoly, we usually mean Windows. Yet the Office productivity suite enjoys such total market dominance, analysts occasionally ponder whether there are even customers left for Microsoft to win. Mac or PC, you've gotta have it. It's so ubiquitous that whenever an organization of significant size threatens to give it up cold turkey, even Linux users take the news with a grain of salt.

Plan to move toward "open" formats isn't foolhardy if the state thinks it can better serve taxpayers by escaping proprietary lock.

The decision by the People's Republic of Massachusetts to require an "open" format for the storage of state documents is a curious one. It seems to be as much about punishing Microsoft as it is the laudable goal of making information more accessible. Microsoft should accede to the state's demand that it open its file formats, not because Massachusetts is demanding it, but because there isn't a good reason not to.

The City of Munich will not start its migration to Linux on the desktop until 2006, a year later than planned and three years since it decided to migrate to Linux.

The state of Massachusetts has laid out a plan to switch all its workers away from Microsoft's Word, Excel and other desktop software applications, delivering what would be one of the most significant setbacks to the software company's battle against open-source software in its home market.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski pledged Tuesday to do his part to make Oregon an attractive place for open-source software development, promising to raise the state's profile within the open-source movement and to raise the movement's profile inside Oregon.

 View older news this year:
 View news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
 View older news in category Government this year:
 View Government news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003