Happy Independence day to my US readers. This holiday is a celebration of the United States adoption of the Declaration of Independence which declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. I thought it would be a good day to remind everyone what open source is all about…

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project have released version 1.0.1 of the Chisimba/KEWL3 Realtime Virtual Classroom.

Time is running out to register for Idlelo 3, the third African Conference on Free and Open Source Software and the Digital Commons. The conference will be held in Dakar, Senegal between 16 and 20 March.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has called on African governments and standards bodies to abstain in the balloting, due to close Saturday, on whether a file format based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) should be an international standard.

In Windhoek last week, the Ministerial Bureau of the fifth Pan African Conference of Ministers for Public or Civil Service met to review progress on the collective work of the various public service ministers. Among the themes covered was that of e-governance and free and open source software (FOSS).

German Development Organization InWEnt is partnering with FOSSFA (The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa" ) on a new training and networking programme called "ict@innovation". Both partners signed an according Letter of Intent at the third African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons – Idlelo 3.

In many African countries, few people have access to computers and the Internet. Experts say this is hindering development and preventing students from being able to compete for jobs.

It's about time. Dell and HP have recently made very strong declarations of OS independence from Microsoft.

African Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) may be spoiling for war with the global software giant, Microsoft Corporation, over its bid to have its DIS 29500 'Office Open Extensible Markup Language (OOXML)' endorsed by the International Standard Organisation (ISO).