"India's Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, a cross-party body created to study Bills being presented for consideration in Parliament, yesterday trashed NIAI Bill which seeks to set up a National Information Authority, whose job is to take over the functioning of the ordinated Unique Identity Authority of India(UIDAI), a branch of the Planning Commission.

The Brazilian government has signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities. The letter asserts that the ODF standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the government.

As companies and communities come together to raise awareness of Open Standards for the forth consecutive Document Freedom Day, the issue of freedom from restricted digital files is more relevant in the UK than ever. "Britain's relationship with Open Standards is rapidly changing for the better.

Open Source for America has released their study of which departments in the federal government are most open source aware and friendly. The results may surprise you.

The Italian region Puglia will make the use of open source software and open standards mandatory for its public administrations. A law, adopted on 2 December by the regional administration, instructs regional and local public administrations to use open formats for the electronic disseminations of documents, and wherever possible use free and open source software.

Linux is being pushed as an alternative to Windows XP in the Government's hard push towards spending cuts in the public sector, ie. Government offices.

For three years, Matthew Burton has been trying to get a simple, useful software tool into the hands of analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency. For three years, haggling over the code’s intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley.

There are new anticircumvention rules from the US Copyright Office. Several are very good changes, such as allowing you to bypass a technological protection measure to use snips from a movie or video if your purpose is educational or for comment or criticism, and there's more flexibility for phone apps if interoperability is the goal.