At a meeting on Sunday, South Africa's minister of public services, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, accepted an invitation to be a patron of the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA).

The South African minister of public service and administration on Monday addressed the opening of the Idlelo 3 free software conference in Dakar Senegal, saying software patents posed a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector.

The KDE e.V. and KDAB are happy to announce continued collaboration on the Free Desktop, with KDAB becoming the latest new Patron of KDE. KDAB is known for its high-quality software services.

In conjunction with Software Freedom Day, the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has made a call for governments to purchase hardware that will not limit its choice of what software to run.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has called on African governments and standards bodies to abstain in the balloting, due to close Saturday, on whether a file format based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) should be an international standard.

German Development Organization InWEnt is partnering with FOSSFA (The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa" ) on a new training and networking programme called "ict@innovation". Both partners signed an according Letter of Intent at the third African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons – Idlelo 3.

"Software patents are evil." Ask almost any free or open source software advocate, and they'll tell you that software patents kill creativity and keep computer science from advancing as rapidly as it would if everyone shared their basic work with everyone else, unencumbered by patents or other restrictions.

It seems Apple is not the entity fighting for a DRM-less world we thought they were and Nokia isn’t such a great patron for open source software either. For those who haven’t heard the news, lobbying by both companies have caused the W3C to strike a provision in a HTML5 draft which would make OGG Vorbis and Theora a standard media format on the web.

"...So, the question of the day is how long service providers will be tolerated as open source vacuums. The Free Software Foundation avoided this issue with GPLv3 but has produced the Affero General Public License (AGPL) to cover the use of code that's delivered over a network, as opposed to on disk or by download as in the past.