One of the things that we open sourcerors need to figure out - or which the market needs to figure out - is the convenience of purchasing proprietary software. By this I don't mean any particular vendor's policies: I'm talking about the basic act of buying something that masquerades as property.

Open source might get a better look-in within government, says Senator Kate Lundy, if those responsible for purchasing decisions were forced by policy to evaluate all the options on the market.

In April I attended a meeting of FLOSS lawyers in Amsterdam. One of the things I got to talk about there was some directions for FLOSS related policy - which turns out to be unusually relevant because the Australian Government is conducting a review into innovation in Australia.

MICROSOFT has suffered further set-backs in the UK education sector this week after Becta, the government procurement quango, reformed its purchasing regime to break the software giant's hold on education, and launched a programme to get schools to adopt open source software.

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

if you want commercial support and consider a typical Windows replacement cycle (~5 years), it seems that Windows is actually cheaper than purchasing RHEL+support or support for Ubuntu.

"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."

Many people have complained about the lack of pre-integrated computers running GNU/Linux or the lack of fully free software drivers for important hardware. Ultimately though, it’s up to you, the consumer, both to satisfy your own requirements and to send a message to vendors that supporting free software pays. You can do this fairly easily by integrating your own computer from its major components, and selecting only components that have free software drivers. It’s certainly possible, and even if you’ve never built a computer before, it’s not all that hard!

The project repeatedly hit snags. Unforeseen production costs nearly doubled the projected price of $100 per machine, hindering poor nations from purchasing it. A Nigerian-owned, Massachusetts-based firm, Lagos Analysis, is suing the foundation for copyright infringement of its laptop keyboard design.