The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not met requirements to provide "open source" intelligence--that is, publicly available information--for state and local law enforcement, a new report shows.

The UK's budget is looming and the public sector is charged with increasing spending on front line services by 4% while budgets go up 2%. Free and open source software is a way of saving millions of pounds in licensing fees and delivering often better products, this article argues.

Public sector and government organizations around the world are adopting increasingly mature open-source products, with Australia at the front of the trend.

Public sector and Open Source Software (PS-OSS), a report commissioned by the EU Commission addresses the question : What would be the potential impact on the development of the Information Society if public organisations (administrations, research institutions, universities, agencies, public companies) were to release software fully owned by them under a Open Source licence?

The economic impact of Open Source software will be discussed with parliamentarians and senior government officials on Wednesday 12th September at the Westminster eForum, held at the Palace of Westminster.

Coverity famously helps open source projects audit their code and eliminate security holes and other bugs, and earns its corporate income by selling software that does the same thing to proprietary software companies. Few seem to realize, though, that Coverity started doing free open source code audits because it got a grant from the US Department of Homeland Security.

He wasn't one who went with the flow, and was widely regarded as an outspoken advocate of the open source movement in Singapore. 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.

Two years into the effort, new report sheds light on how effective your tax dollars have been at improving open source security.

The use of open source environments for enterprise software projects is growing at an unprecedented rate, with notable peaks of interest among financial services and public sector organizations. Indeed, the adoption of open source software is growing at a great clip, with worldwide revenue from standalone open source software having reached $1.8 billion in 2006, according to recent calculations from IDC. That figure is expected to reach $5.8 billion by 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent. As a result, IDC is calling open source "the most significant, all-encompassing, and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s."