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

 Open-source lab for local, state governments debuts in N.Y., Sep 03, 2008

If you want local and state government officials to take a serious look at open-source software,

The Australian Taxation Office has advised Australians using Apple or Linux operating systems that they will be unable to lodge tax returns electronically using the ATO's e-tax software unless they use a Windows emulator or a kiosk in one of the agency's shop fronts.

In a setback for the City of Vienna's three-year-old open-source migration programme, city authorities decided on Wednesday to scrap most of the systems that have so far adopted the city's custom-built Linux distribution, instead approving an €8m migration to Windows Vista.

Casey Coleman, the chief information officer of the General Services Administration, spoke at a Federal Open Source Alliance Web seminar held earlier today.

The Brazilian Electoral Supreme Court announced last Friday that Brazil's 2008 elections will use 430,000 electronic voting machines running GNU/Linux and open sauce voting applications.

In multiple media reports over the past two weeks, the US Army has professed its love for the penguin. The Army eventually intends to move from a Windows-based infrastructure over to Linux for its new, roughly $200bn weapons program.

Trusted Computer Solutions has upgraded its Security Blanket security compliance software so that it can make Red Hat Enterprise Linux compliant with the settings defined in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guide for that operating system.

What happens when the U.S. Army, whose Blue-Force Tracking system runs on Microsoft software, starts introducing the Future Combat Systems (FCS) vehicles that use the Linux operating system?

France's gendarmerie has apparently taken quite a liking to such open source software as Firefox and OpenOffice. Now, there are plans to migrate 70,000 workstations in the country's largest administrative complex to Linux according to a report in the French daily L'Express

Agencies expect to increase open source use, vendor support remains a concern

Norway has established a new policy mandating government adoption of open standards. Starting in 2009, all documents published on state-operated web sites will have to use HTML, PDF, or ODF formats.

According to this article (Norwegian only, sorry) on digi.no the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009. I’ll give a brief overview of what the article actually says.

The New Zealand Ministry for Justice believes that open source software is a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective choice compared to proprietary solutions.

Bitter political foes South and North Korea are to jointly develop a version of Linux.

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.

ODF supporters are welcoming presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama's promise to put government data online in universally accessible formats should he be elected.

The demand of the police union now is to drop the Microsoft-based software and to reconsider the usage of free and open source systems instead. The saved money could then be used to pay the officers their full christmas gratification.

It wasn't very long ago that open-source developers struggled to make the market believe that open source was secure, ready for prime-time adoption, etc. Now the debate has shifted to demonstrating just how widespread adoption is and and pointing to case studies of how to get the most from open source.

A week before the workshop the South African government became the latest country in the world to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a government standard for information exchange.

More than half of all US government executives have rolled out open-source software at their agencies, and 71% believe their agency can benefit from open-source software, according to a survey.

In order to fully take advantage of open-source software, Defense Department agencies may need to rethink how they do procurement, said Fritz Schulz, who works in the chief technology office of the Defense Information Systems Agency.

The UK government does not know how much open-source software it uses or what its value is, ministers have admitted.

The Nigerian government has shunned the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme and placed an order for 17,000 Intel Classmate budget PCs.

Governments should not lock themselves into proprietary software straitjackets unless there is no viable open-source option. Period. Democratic governments have a duty to their citizens to own their IT, and not have private-sector vendors effectively owning mass quantities of citizens' data.

The State Services Commission’s championing of open source software in government helped its ICT branch pick up an award in the government category of the inaugural New Zealand Open Source Awards, held in Wellington this month.

Asian governments are pivotal to Red Hat Inc.'s goal of earning 60 percent of its revenue from outside the US by the end of 2009, said Matthew Szulik, the company's chairman, chief executive officer, and president, in a conference call on Thursday.

The BBC, slammed by the British public and government alike for handing its iPlayer program to Microsoft, has made clear that the full application will remain Windows-only. Only a stripped-down YouTube-alike version is planned for other platforms. From the Guardian:

Schoolchildren in Russia are to be taught using the free, open-source Linux software in an effort to cut the cost of teaching information technology.

Uruguay's government this week announced the results of a study indicating that XO computers from the One Laptop Per Child project were a better value for the nation's schoolchildren than Intel's similar offering, the Classmate PC.

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.

DLT Solutions Inc. has won a five-year $45 million blanket purchase from the Department of Energy to provide the agency with Linux information systems.

Cheok Beng Teck, CIO of the country's Ministry of Defense (Mindef), chartered the way that saw the government body embrace--almost unabashedly--an open source strategy that few in the public sector would have been as comfortable adopting.

The Bhutan government liked its first taste of Linux so much that it has come back for seconds, releasing an updated version of its Debian-based operating system that it launched last year.

This small city on Florida's Gulf Coast runs one of the most cost-effective municipal IT departments around. I last wrote about Largo's Linux-based client-server network in 2002. A lot has changed for Largo's computer-using city employees since then, and even more changes are in the works.

Over a year ago CBR published a look at the UK's adoption of open source software in the UK and promised a later update. That update is long overdue, and is also timely given that tomorrow some of the leading open source advocates in the country will gather in Westminster to debate the future of open source in this country.

People in the city of Lund in Sweden that use the Microsoft Vista OS can't connect to the Internet.

Agency cites increased competition from Firefox, iTunes, Flash, and web-based e-mail--as well as Dell's Linux-based PC offerings--as evidence that the settlement did its job.

Governments looking to migrate to open source software (OSS) will need to ramp up their internal skills base, according to Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio.

“This is a question of sovereignty of information,” said Bob Sutor, manager of standards at IBM. “To what degree should a government give control of their information to a vendor? And my answer would be, none.”

A major European vendor of city-wide traffic management systems is porting its flagship traffic light controller to Linux and real-time Java. Signalbau Huber says its Actros controller will better meet safety-critical requirements after moving to Sysgo ELinOS/PikeOS 4.1 with Aonix's PERC real-time Java runtime.

A U.K.-based embedded software consultancy says it recently implemented a Linux driver and other software for a marine-based military application involving high-speed, fiber-optic networking. Pebble Bay Consulting Ltd. says it helped U.K.-based defense contractor Kaon implement an "embedded Linux" solution for an unspecified military customer.

The Malaysian government today announced plans to adopt open standards and the Open Document Format (ODF) within the country's public sector.

Microsoft wins. We lose. With Massachusetts' surrender to Open XML, open standards have taken a major hit, which will eventually hit us in the wallet.

The commonwealth of Massachusetts has officially thrown its weight behind Microsoft's Office Open XML format along with the OASIS Open Document Format.

Since last week the coastal city of Rosario, Argentina's second largest city and home of about a million people is among the growing club of World cities with free municipal Wi-Fi access.

Since 1998, taxpayers in Australia have been able to file their returns online. Sorry, let me say that again: taxpayers who have access to, and use, Windows on any kind of PC have had this kind of facility since the aforementioned year.

With about a week remaining to collect comments on a plan to adopt Ecma’s Open XML standard, Massachusetts is mum on how the issue is fairing, but some who disagree with the action are already voicing their opinion publicly.

Italy's parliament is about to undertake Europe's largest governmental migration yet to open sauce.

The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), the leading organization advocating for openness and accessibility to government documents and information, today congratulated Japan for adopting a policy under which government ministries and agencies will solicit bids from software vendors whose products support internationally recognized open standards.

Indian state Kerala is looking at Open Source software to help improve literacy rates and boost the local economy; in January of this year, another Indian state Tamil Nadu switched over more than 3,000 government desktops to Linux and will not offer Windows unless it's an "absolute necessity".

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