Amongst many other things, one matter that they order better in France is the production of government reports with a grand sweep. One was published a couple of days ago, with the self-explanatory title Rapport de la Commission pour la libération de la croissance française. Well, anything that talks about "libération" obviously makes my one-track mind think of free software, and I wasn't disappointed, since one of the report's proposals is about precisely that

Shortly after switching all of its 13,000 public internet information workstations from Windows NT to Linux, the Federal Employment Office (BA) issued an interim report. According to an announcement by Klaus Vitt, CIO for the BA, the switch to open source software will, "allow the BA to react with flexibility to new technological developments. In the future, a broad range of software will be available to the BA that it can use to access various internet media, and to ensure optimal internet communication for its clients."

With just weeks to go before South Korea's presidential election at the end of last year, Seoul's newspapers were full of stories about historic North-South cooperation.

"This is an interesting interview with a professor involved in the Cuban free software movement. He makes an interesting argument which is that the free as in price argument is not a compelling argument for Cuba to switch to free software. Because of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, in the past, their government and universities have used pirated, unlicensed proprietary software by default.

Officials of the City of Amsterdam to work within a few years probably no longer with Windows. A test has shown that the open source software Linux performs better.

Richard Monson-Haefel, an analyst at the Burton group, just posted a sarcastic and inaccurate analysis of Android on the company’s blog. In his article, called “Why Microsoft Loves Google’s Android“, Monson-Haefel claims that Microsoft should be “secretly celebrating” Google’s introduction of Android.

A stark future awaits American health care if the Veterans Affairs (VA) system and Cerner is allowed to go forward with announced plans to replace the VA's successful public domain laboratory software, in need of update, with a proprietary one.