Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary desktop configurations, says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry.

DIN e.V., the German standards institute, has now posted the results of the meeting August 21 by the technical committee. It's a "yes" (or "yes, comments") decision on Microsoft's submission of OOXML as a proposed standard. It's in German, naturally.

Belgium and the Netherlands will not yet consider OOXML, Microsoft's format for electronic documents, it appears from comments by the Belgian Federal ICT advisory body Fedict and the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs.

On September 2, the comment and voting period will close on ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the draft specification based upon Microsoft's Office Open XML formats (OOXML). The Linux Foundation (LF) has received questions from outside its membership regarding its position on adoption of OOXML in its current form as a global standard, and on the adoption process itself.

France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in

"At the first international workshop of users of the Open Document Format (ODF) in Berlin to which the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic had invited about 150 users and political observers, Brazil and India, in addition to German cities such as Munich, emerged as leading proponents of open standards in the office area.

Microsoft’s position is hardening as the ISO vote on OOXML (DIS 29500) in Geneva approaches at the end of this month. We know more clearly now how Microsoft and its proxy group, ECMA, will position Microsoft’s OOXML specification in advance of the vote. In short, Microsoft is betting that its influence with National Bodies will allow it to push through a specification which elevates its own interests over that of truly competitive, open international standards. In the end, it will be Microsoft’s own inflexibility that will be its undoing, and that undoing means knocking the OOXML out of approval for ISO status.

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

Miroslav Jovanovic, former head of Macedonian Ministry of Finance IT department, gave an overview of the Open Source utilisation at desktops and servers during a conference organized by the United Nations Development Programme at the capital Skopje in 2007.